Renée is 40 and works long hours for low pay to try to provide for her four children, aged 3 to 14, and her 80-year-old mother. The three generations of the family share a damp and overcrowded three-bedroom council flat in Hackney, in inner London.
Meet Renée and family in the following three videos recorded in February 2012. Updates will be coming soon.
Jennie is 39 and unemployed. She lives with her three sons, all of whom have disabilities, in Redbridge, outer London. The family has lived in temporary accommodation for the last 12 years.
Meet Jennie and family in the following three videos recorded in autumn 2011. Updates will be coming soon.
Transcript
Jennie is 39 and unemployed. She lives with her three sons, all of whom have disabilities, in Redbridge, outer London. The family has lived in temporary accommodation for the last 12 years.
Meet Jennie and family in the following three videos recorded in autumn 2011. Updates will be coming soon.
Transcript
Renée is 40 and works long hours for low pay to try to provide for her four children, aged 3 to 14, and her 80-year-old mother. The three generations of the family share a damp and overcrowded three-bedroom council flat in Hackney, in inner London.
Meet Renée and family in the following three videos recorded in February 2012. Scroll to the bottom of the page for updates.
Renee a low paid worker
Improved parenting is currently often advocated as the best route to improve outcomes for children and, explicitly, as a better alternative than reducing poverty. Past academic research has found strong links between poverty and children’s achievement and, operating both separately and relatedly, links between parenting and outcomes. By including elements of parenting and family relationships in the Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey, the PSE: UK team aims to provide evidence about the relationship between poverty and aspects of parenting that have received significant recent political attention but which, as yet, have been the subject of limited empirical research.
Current government policy on social justice hinges on the claim that there are 120,000 ‘troubled’ families in Britain. In this paper, Ruth Levitas argues that if we interrogate the research on which this figure is based, it turns out to be a factoid – something that takes the form of a fact, but is not. The claim is used to support policies that in no way follow from the research on which the figure is based. Read a summary.
In this consultation response, the PSE: UK research team is highly critical of the Coalition government’s social mobility strategy and, in particular, its claim that the best way to tackle intergenerational mobility is to break the ‘the transmission of disadvantage from one generation to the next’. The PSE policy working paper dismisses the idea that poverty is ‘transmitted’ between generations as ‘simply incorrect’ and argues that the best way to tackle intergenerational disadvantage and low social mobility is to eradicate poverty among children and adults. Read a summary.
In this consultation response, the PSE research team welcomes the emphasis on early years in the Field Review’s report, The Foundation Years: Preventing Poor Children becoming Poor Adults, but is critical of key aspects of the report. The response working paper argues that key elements of the proposed strategy are ‘narrow, partial and highly likely to be ineffective’. Read a summary.
This paper discusses indicators relating to Domain 4 (‘Cultural Resources’) and Domain 7 (‘Cultural Participation’) of the revised Bristol Social Exclusion Matrix (BSEM) for use in the current Poverty and Social Exclusion survey. In the BSEM, education is treated as a resource as well as an aspect of cultural participation. Questions in the PSE survey therefore need to cover both the educational resources (human capital) of the adults in the survey, i.e. their educational background, and the educational resources currently received by children.
A new review of research on families living on a low income finds that the recent recession has generated additional burdens for parents in these circumstances, including increased time pressures, a decline in nutrition, and higher stress levels. The review, Parenting on a Low Income, conducted by About Families, finds that women in particular bear the burden of coping.