Child poverty seminar
On Wednesday 19 July, Tribal CTAD sponsored an expert seminar on child poverty, organised by the Institute for Public Policy Review (ippr). Held at the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining in Carlton House Terrace, the event was chaired by our director of lifelong learning, Barry Brooks, and attended by an expert audience of over 100 delegates from the world of children’s policy, strategy and practice.
The keynote speaker was Beverley Hughes, Minister for children, young people and families. Other speakers included Lisa Harker, the Government's new child poverty tsar, Nick Pearce, director of ippr, and Dr Jane Waldfogel, professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University and research associate at the London School of Economics. Dr Waldfogel has recently published ‘What Children Need’.
The minister took the opportunity to announce a new £10 million initiative - parenting early intervention pathfinders. These pathfinders will operate over two years in 15 local authorities and will be designed to reduce the inequalities and life chances of those children most at risk. In her speech, Beverley Hughes focused on the needs of families and outlined the Government’s priorities for this phase. These priorities included a renewed focus on supporting parents and carers, extending the boundaries of existing universal services to reduce social inequality, developing closer working between adult and children services, and earlier help and intervention where needed.
In her presentation, Lisa Harker recognised that whilst the Government had actually missed its target for reducing child poverty real progress had been made. She also reminded everyone of the scale of need of families living in poverty and urged a greater public awareness of the challenges in reaching Government targets to reduce poverty. Lisa suggested that there was still an absence of clear public support for change and that this stemmed from poor public perception of what child poverty actually meant, the impact it had on the lives of children and the scale of deprivation that still existed in the UK.
Jane Waldfogel drew on some of the evidence from her research on what children and young people need in the way of services and childcare. She was able to identify a number of areas in which this country leads the field and identified those that still needed greater development including out-of-school programmes.
A lively question and answer session followed the keynote speeches. A number of delegates re-iterated the emphasis placed by Nick Pearce on the needs of young people at the other end of the age range from early years for support with non-cognitive skills and structure to out-of-school activities.