lundi 24 septembre 2012

Focus on the under-fives to give all children an equal chance

The review I conducted shows the huge difference made by early intervention, yet its key recommendation has been ignored

Nursery schoolchildren
'The good news is that high-quality interventions and effective policies that begin much earlier than the first day of school really can make a difference.' Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
In December 2010 I delivered an independent review on poverty and life chances to the government. Officially, my report was hailed by David Cameron and Nick Clegg as "marking a vital moment in the history of our efforts to tackle poverty and disadvantage".

Some of the review's recommendations, such as efforts to improve parenting skills, have been acted upon. However, the government has shown little interest in following up the review's key recommendation, despite the interlinked social ills of child poverty and lack of social mobility being high on the political agenda. Unfortunately we continue to tackle these ills in an outdated manner that ignores a huge amount of evidence-based work.

Take the current poverty measure, which defines a family as being in poverty if its income is less than 60% of the median household income that year. This approach has incentivised a strategy that is heavily focused on reducing child poverty rates in the short term through income transfers. Yet the evidence shows that increasing household income does not automatically protect poorer children against the high risk that they will end up in poverty as adults. There needs to be a broader approach to tackling child poverty that focuses on improving the life chances of poor children.

This links directly to social mobility. The government's strategy to improve social mobility is heavily centred on schools. Arguably this again ignores the evidence. Last week Ofsted released three reports on the pupil premium, the flagship government scheme to improve educational outcomes for children from low-income families. This academic year £1.25bn was allocated for the programme.
The reports were disappointing. Half of schools surveyed said the scheme made little or no difference to the way they were being operated. Only 10% said it was having a significant effect. Sir Michael Wilshaw, Ofsted's chief inspector, believes that funds were simply being used to "plug the gap" in school budgets.

Schools must use the premium for its stated aim of trying to improve social mobility. But can it even work? A large body of research concludes that schools are highly ineffective in improving the life chances of poorer children. Almost a decade ago Leon Feinstein, a professor at the Institute of Education, found evidence that shows that the success individuals achieve during their adult life can be predicted by their ability level on their first day of primary school. It is in the very early years of life that the gaps in outcomes, which the pupil premium aims to close, appear.

By age three there are significant ability differences between children from lower and higher income families. These gaps persist throughout childhood, widening during school years (especially after age 11). The good news is that high-quality interventions and effective policies that begin much earlier than the first day of school really can make a difference.

The review I conducted set out a strategy to prevent this ability gap between richer and poorer children emerging in the first place. The evidence that children's life chances are most heavily predicated on their development in the first five years of life informed the proposal to establish a new set of "life chances indicators" to run alongside the government's existing child poverty measures.
These new indicators offer the possibility of measuring how successful we are as a country in making children's life outcomes more equal. I also recommended that the government establish the foundation years as a new pillar in our education system. The foundation years would coalesce all under-fives services making them more effective and self-reinforcing.

Yet the government has shown little interest in developing these recommendations. It does not help that policy for the early years is split across Whitehall, with no one department or minister having overall responsibility. I also believe that this is a prime ministerial government, and the chances of a bold new policy getting off the ground depend on whether the prime minister is driving it. Despite the government talking the talk on social mobility, it seems to have its hands full with the other big reforms taking place across Whitehall, and I am unsure as to how much appetite there is to really tackle the root causes of the problem. It would of course require a big and bold shift in the status quo to accept the evidence that schools have been ineffective in improving life chances and that for many children outcomes are unfortunately decided much earlier in life.

As the government has chosen not to proceed with these recommendations, I have decided to do so myself. This year I established a new charity – the Foundation Years Trust – in my Birkenhead constituency to pilot the review's proposals. The council leader, councillor Phil Davies, is backing the project and on Thursday will recommend that a £300,000 grant be awarded to the trust to complete a pilot project.

Even in tough times, Davies is showing that local authorities can be innovative and use the depleted funds they still have to back evidence-based work to tackle big problems that we have failed to successfully address in the past.

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