In Tackling Child Poverty and Improving Life Chances: Consulting on a New Approach, the PSE: UK research team has responded to the consultation on the Field Review’s report, The Foundation Years: Preventing Poor Children Becoming Poor Adults. The response welcomes the emphasis on early years in the Field report but is critical of key aspects of the report, arguing that key elements of the proposed strategy are ‘narrow, partial and highly likely to be ineffective’.
Government policies on child poverty have shifted too far in their focus on individual families rather than wider problems, according to the first director of the Sure Start programme, Naomi Eisenstadt. Despite her own commitment to championing parenting classes as a key element of Sure Start, Eisenstadt is critical of the Coalition government’s drift towards promoting good parenting as a key theme in reducing child poverty. ‘I would rather put the food on the table. In the absence of any talk about paying the bills, this focus is disrespectful because it assumes that these are the problems poor people have, and does not recognise that the main problem poor people have is not having enough money,’ she is quoted in The Guardian. ‘It is true that conflict between parents is bad for children, so providing more couple relationship support is a good thing.
In Social Mobility and Child Poverty, 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 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.
The Foundation Years: Preventing Poor Children Becoming Poor Adults, the final report of the UK Government Independent Review on Poverty and Life Chances headed by Labour MP Frank Field, argues for an expansion of provision for children in their early years and a downgrading of efforts to reduce income poverty.
BackgroundIn June 2010, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, commissioned Frank Field MP to conduct an Independent Review on Poverty and Life Chances.
The aim of the Review was to: