The review I conducted shows the huge difference made by early intervention, yet its key recommendation has been ignored
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an outdated manner that ignores a huge amount of evidence-based work.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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