Yes, I know, I promised you a blogpost about workfare, but frankly, the dogs have all barked and the caravan moved on..
However, fresh material arrived today in the form of Frank Field's report on child poverty, entitled 'The Foundation Years: Preventing poor children becoming poor adults'. This interests me both personally (I have a child) and professionally (child poverty is my 'thing').
Before I get into the meat of his report, let's consider the terms of Field's remit. He was tasked with, inter alia, generating 'a broader debate' and coming up with recommendations consistent with the Government's fiscal strategy. I fear the latter part may end up having priority over the former.
Poor children, (using the current definition of those living in households receiving below 60% of median income), tend to arrive at school less well-prepared, have reduced educational outcomes, and therefore go on to enjoy reduced life choices re employment and quality of life. We know this, because a. numerous studies have demonstrated it over the years, and b. Frank Field has just researched it all over again.
He comes, however, to a rather different conclusion than his forebears: for Field, what matters in tackling child poverty and its effects isn't simply the amount of money going into households, but the quality of the interactions within them, especially between parents and their children. In fact, he seems to think they matter more.
On the face of it, this seems rather commonsensical. After all, money can't buy you love, right? What Field ignores ( unlike some, I don't believe he does so wilfully), is that without money, everything else becomes a lot more difficult. Living in poverty, on a very low-income, is stressful, and as any parent will tell you, stress makes sub-optimal parents of us all.
Which leads to me to the personal. I have been a single parent living on benefit. This arose after the death of my partner. However, I neither want nor deserve pity. It was my choice to have my son, my choice to keep him and my choice to remain at home with him until he was 3 1/2, and I returned, first to volunteering, and then to work.
But, our situation does give me an insight into Field's hypothesis and I think he is wrong. Firstly, of course the strength of the parental bond matters more than cash. Naturally, reading with one's child is good. But if, whilst you are doing these things, there is a steady drip-drip of anxiety about the gas going off, or how to pay for a school trip, in my experience, you cannot be as fully 'there' as you would be otherwise.
I assumed that reading was good. So we joined the library. But children should have their own books too, and we didn't have the money to buy them. I knew listening to music was good-but taking CDs out of the library incurred a charge.And then there was the day that James threw his shoes in a pond...
I also fear that the practical applications of his ideas will not actually work, if undertaken. Take for example, the proposal that rather than increasing tax credits year-on-year, that cash should be put into building the Foundation Years. Not only does this not seem very Big Society, as it removes choice re expenditure from the individual & places the money at the disposal of the State, there is another, worse problem.
Tax credits as with other benefits, are up-rated to allow for effects of inflation. Food and fuel inflation are predicted to spiral higher in the near future. Food and fuel represent major expenditures for low-income households. After all, you can buy second-hand clothes, toys and books, but a secondhand apple? Not so much. So in order to pay for the shiny new Foundation Years, poor children will actually get poorer in real terms.
Another snag, could be how families, in need of this intensive interaction will be identified. Field proposes that Local Authorities pool data and that DWP data be made available to the LAs. Government. Big databanks. What could possibly go wrong?
The report says, repeatedly, that the child poverty targets set by Labour, were laudable, but ultimately unsustainable. What it ignores, is the fact that because the targets were never reached, we can never know what the effects might have been had they been attained. He assumes that 100% success would have made no difference.
There are things that are good about this report. The idea that Childrens' Centres should become 'one-stop shops' where parents are able to register births, and complete benefit forms is good, as is the premise of continuity of care from pregnancy to school, and beyond. The latter, will of course require staff, lots of staff. Remember the fiscal strategy? Hmmmm.
I think Frank Field is a good man. I also know, both from personal experience and from research that inter-generational poverty, is one of the toughest nuts to crack. However, given his remit, and given this Government's philosophy, this report misses the point-poverty is about money, and no amount of research can get us away from that.
5 comments:
You must appreciate that the 'poverty of aspiration' and 'you're all bad parents who drink too much, smoke too much and eat the wrong food' is too firmly embedded in our masters' thinking to be shifted by statements of the bleedin' obvious about the relationship between not having enough cash and poverty!
Question is - if St Frank's missed the point a little (and you may be right there) what should we do? The evidence is that the current benefits structure hasn't really worked (except in its base purpose of satisfying basic needs just about).
Seems to me that we have to completely restructure our priorities - keep the cash but make it contingent on personal development. This might be education, training or setting up a business. It may just be taking on running the school fete.
What would you do?
I would employ more health visitors, for a start, giving them a 'beat', so that they knew their clients.
I would indeed encourage parents to get involved with PTAs etc-at the moment they are very m/c enclaves, and you can learn v. useful skills running a fete!
Other than that-too many for here!
Anna, I know it is a bit off topic, but it relates to what you've said in your reply.
Today I had a long chat with a friend who's a district nurse. In reply to "how's things" she said "love the patients, love the work; hate the job". Like much of our public services, Community Health Services are being run down. (Actually they have been for a couple of years, the last government's idea of divesting itself off of this service meant that the people providing it developed the feeling that it had no future... But with the NHS pay freeze, and the freeze on recruitment it means that the number of frontline workers is getting to critical levels. There's a limit to anyone's dedication to their vocation..)
Anyway, we were talking about the elderly and how they can simply "slip through the net" - an elderly person may innocently miss a hospital appointment and the hospital, reluctant to waste money on another appointment they expect to be missed, don't bother making another. She pointed out that as a district nurse she does check things like missed hospital appointments and often has to bully GPs to refer the patient again. But that only happens with the patients seen by the district nurses - there are many other people.
It seems to me that a possibility is to give health visitors or district nurses a responsibility for a manageable community. Their responsibility would be for improving the health of the entire community. That can be measured in all kinds of ways (no doubt you can suggest a few).
In terms of the elderly, we know that Lansley intend to set a target of cutting unscheduled hospital admissions by 20% (that's right, it is a fallacy to say that targets have been abolished in the NHS, in fact Lansley's targets are a lot worse than New Labour's ever were). A lot of "unscheduled admissions" are due to falls, and it is known that people who are active and eat well are less likely to have a fall. That's the sort of thing that health workers do.
In raw figures, a broken hip costs about £5.5k to fix, and then quite a few more thousands in extra hospital care and extra primary care. A health visitor preventing just a few falls a year can easily save his/her salary.
I think Field's basic premise - that children born into poverty, both financial and intellectual, are automatically destined to remain there without intervention - is facile.
The working class he claims to represent (he's been my MP for 25 years, and given how unpopular he is, I'm amazed he still is), has a long and honourable history of hauling itself up by its collective bootstraps.
This is my take on it http://ronsrants.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/robbing-peter-to-pay-paul-never-works/
"I assumed that reading was good. So we joined the library. But children should have their own books too, and we didn't have the money to buy them. "
I agree, but to be honest, if there's a library within reach, not having the money for books isn't a major problem.
I had few books of my own as a child, despite always asking for books, or vouchers, when I asked what I'd like for birthdays/Christmas, but I had easy library access so it really wasn't a hardship. And, later, I was the school librarian, so I got first pick.
It wasn't until I was working that I was able to buy books and, since then I must have bought over 6,000, and read thousands more library books.
Currently I own something over,2000, having offloaded 4.000-odd years ago, through lack of space, and I recently bought a Kindle because I was running out of space again, in my small flat - didn't work!
In retrospect, I don't think I consciously regretted not having my own books as a child (but I did resent it twice a year - my family, it's fair to say, wasn't interested in books, though my mother did teach me to read well by the time I was 4, and I aced Janet & John at pre-school!), but I can't honestly say I suffered from a lack of books. Probably quite the opposite - not having many motivated me to seek them out in libraries.
I think that if a child has an urge to read, s/he'll find a way.
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