News

Neil Thompson looks at government-commissioned research into the impact of poverty on the lives of young people and children.

The institute for social and economic research at the University of Essex has produced a report on poverty, commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions.

It concentrates on the impact of poverty on children and adolescents and is based on the British Household Panel Surveys between 1991 and 1999. The panel survey is a multi-purpose study that follows the same representative sample of individuals - the panel - over a period of years, using interviews and linking up with data from other surveys and from local area statistics. Using the panel survey, the Essex report draws out a number of conclusions about those who grew up in poverty. These include:

- They left home earlier than their peers.

- They were more likely to be inactive, especially true of those who experienced poverty either in pre-school years (0-5) or in adolescence (11-15).

- Girls faced a substantially higher risk of early childbearing.

- Lack of parental resources when children were in primary school had a large negative impact on educational outcomes, with male chances of achieving A-level qualifications or above being reduced (female educational achievements were more affected by their parents' education and by family structure).

- Compared with those who had not lived in poverty, poor children were found to have lower self-esteem, were more likely to plan not to marry, believe that health is a matter of luck and expect to leave school at 16.

The data showed that about one in four adolescents were living in poor households (those with an income less than 60 per cent of the national average in a given year), and one in six were living in "persistent" poverty (in poverty in at least three of the past four years). We are therefore talking about a significant proportion of the population.

The report tells us a lot more about the impact of poverty on children's lives, and it does not make for reassuring reading. While social work staff continue to find themselves overworked and under-resourced, we have to come back to the argument that social work needs to be underpinned by social policy initiatives that address poverty on a wider level, if local level social work efforts are to succeed.

Indeed, this research adds weight to the need for government policy in relation to children and young people to go beyond "education, education, education" and to adopt a broader focus when seeking to invest in future generations.

For practitioners and managers, there is a need to ensure that, with all the other pressures to contend with, the significance of class, poverty and deprivation are not allowed to be pushed to the margins.

Poverty remains a major challenge. As Jones and Novak¹ argue: "Poverty and inequality are among the most fundamental human rights abuses in the world today. They distort, corrode and destroy people's lives. They condemn vast numbers to intolerable conditions, which are neither acceptable nor necessary in a world which has the capacity to provide every single person with the means of a decent, human existence. That this potential is not realised is not some inevitable mystery of nature, but rather a consequence of human agency. It need not be."

- John Ermisch, Marco Francesconi and David J Pevalin, The Outcomes for Children of Poverty, Department for Work and Pensions, 2001 (Report No 158, ISBN 1841234184), price £33. A summary is available on the department's website: www.dss.gov.uk/asd/asd5/ (click on "research summaries" and scroll down to report 158).

Neil Thompson is a director of Avenue Consulting and a visiting professor at the University of Liverpool.

References

¹C Jones, and TNovak, Poverty, Welfare and the Disciplinary State, Routledge, 1999