Every child, regardless of their background, deserves the opportunity to fulfil their potential. Indeed, we have a responsibility as a society to create the conditions in which every child can grow up happy and healthy, and to make what they will of their lives. Together, we have a shared duty to enable all children to thrive.
A new report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on social mobility reminds us that too many children face a set of disadvantages that their peers do not, and highlights the urgent need for action. The report shows that social background and geography still have a huge influence on children’s life chances, and that differences in school achievement act as a block on social mobility. Children with a poor vocabulary at the age of five, it shows, are more than twice as likely to be unemployed at age 34. This gap between children from less well-off households and the rest of the population can have a hugely negative impact on them, their families and our communities more widely. If we can’t close this gap, we will all be the poorer for it.
Any serious attempt to rectify the national picture set out in the MPs’ report must recognise just how early in a child’s life the critical, underpinning cognitive skills develop. And it must recognise that, as with so many of the complex social problems we are wrestling with, improving outcomes in this area will require a coordinated response by lots of people and services coming together around the child. There is no silver bullet, and no one service or support person can do it by themselves.
We know that a substantial language gap already exists among children by the age of three, with middle and upper-income children having a vocabulary which is at least twice the size as their low-income peers. But the foundational cognitive skills that support language development – such as the very concepts of words and numbers, or the understanding that other people exist and can be interacted with – emerge much earlier. If our aim is to support social mobility by encouraging healthy language development, then waiting for a child’s first word may be waiting too long already.
There are lots of professionals, including health visitors, nursery educators and childcare settings, who can make a positive and crucial difference. Because they go into the home, where so much of a child’s earliest learning is done, health visitors have a particularly important role to play in supporting parents and caregivers to provide a nurturing environment. They must be enabled to provide intensive, high-quality home visiting support to low-income families in the first few years of a child’s life. With a recent survey by the Institute of Health Visiting revealing that many health visitors are worried about not being able to deliver the services they should to vulnerable children, further investment may be required if these earliest social mobility ‘blockers’ are to be removed for all children, whichever part of the country they are growing up in.
This is why providing an effective response around children and families who need extra support requires national leadership and coordination paired with local decision-making, knowledge and resources. Local authorities and other local services are best placed to know what the needs are in their areas, and how they respond will rightly differ from place to place.
Concerningly, the MPs’ report on social mobility questions whether funding is currently being used effectively. As a country, we cannot afford to be delivering interventions that do not stand a good chance of making a difference. We must commit to investing in approaches which have been shown to work via rigorous testing, and at the same time, to evaluating more of the popular or innovative approaches that are being used but which have not been tested to determine whether they are really producing results.
On this, leadership starts at the top. We need to take a big picture approach, including national coordination of children’s policy, which is currently fragmented across multiple government departments and agencies. Improving coordination will help to ensure a coherent offer that joins up health and local authority systems and makes best use of all the various services, settings and workforces that are already out there.
Perhaps obscured in the slipstream of a fast-approaching Brexit deadline is a golden opportunity for government to provide the leadership and coordination required. The upcoming spending review must be the moment when the cycle is broken, when we establish a national plan for children, and invest for the long term. We have a responsibility to our youngest citizens to remove the ‘blockers’ in their lives, and this will require a whole new level of political priority and commitment.