Hand-outs for middle class parents don’t help the poorest children
In a tight spending environment, anyone who cares about child poverty should be advocating for policies that have a real impact – not free school meals for wealthy families, says Ben Gadsby
The government is marking the post-Easter return to school with a focus on poverty, as they begin rolling out breakfast clubs to every primary school.
In a tight spending environment, those of us who care about young people from disadvantaged backgrounds need to target our advocacy on interventions that will have a real impact on their life chances – and breakfast clubs are an example of just that. The evidence shows breakfast clubs improve attainment, which is why this government is building on the work of the previous one. There’s the rare combination of a bold ambition and a phased roll-out. And it’s a policy that will benefit the poorest in society, too many of whom show up to school hungry.
It’s an approach which stands in stark contrast to other alleged anti-poverty policies, like universal free school lunches. With the poorest quarter of pupils already receiving free school meals, widening eligibility would do nothing to help the people who need it most. Instead, the winners would be better-off families.
Expanding provision that already supports the people that need it most, by definition, can’t help those young people that are most in need of additional support. It’s hard to argue this is a sensible priority given the scale of the wider challenges.
The scale of disadvantage
At age 5, young people from disadvantaged backgrounds score, on average, 19 months behind their peers on vocabulary tests. They are twice as likely to be persistently absent from school, four times more likely to be suspended and five times more likely to be permanently excluded. By the time they are teenagers, they are 40 per cent less likely to get good GCSEs and almost half as likely to pass GCSE English and maths compared to their better off peers. For those progressing into higher education, the gap between them and their better off peers is the widest it’s ever been. They are twice as likely to be neither earning nor learning in their early 20s.
In the face of these prospects, what young people from disadvantaged backgrounds need are intentional, evidence-based interventions designed for impact. As an impact-focussed funder, Impetus has spent 23 years supporting non-profits that help young people get key qualifications and find good jobs. The thing all our successful partners have in common is intentionality and clarity of purpose. This is the best way to truly transform the lives of young people who have the odds stacked against them, not giving their classmates free lasagne.
Many people working on issues around poverty and socioeconomic disadvantage would be surprised by how low these topics feature in the wider public consciousness. As head of policy and research at Impetus, I work with a range of tutoring charities who make high quality tutoring available to families that can’t afford it. But our recent research found that parents don’t see tutoring in those terms at all – they see it as being for people who have fallen behind in education, rather than from an equity angle.
We need to remake the case that poverty matters. There’s a clear moral case for demanding a certain minimum standard of living for all, such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Essentials Guarantee. It’s impossible not to object to some of our neighbours being unable to meet basic needs to stay warm and fed in the way that people with experience of poverty talk about. Tackling this should be a national priority.
And given the disparities in outcomes, we need to be focusing our limited resources where they can have the most impact. Universal free school meals is couched in the language of ending stigma for children in poverty, which is hard to disagree with – but perhaps a questionable priority when there are children who currently come to school without breakfast or having slept in insecure housing.
There are big choices ahead for the country. We need to pick targeted and effective support for the young people who need it most.
Ben Gadsby is Head of Policy and Research at Impetus