I don't know what to think about this - Some parents need to be nannied by the state

You are surely joking?
Literally nobody lives in luxury in 3 star hotels as a migrant. In fact, if the hotel provides food (and I use the term loosely and the quality is generally extremely poor), an individual is entitled to monetary support of just under £9 a week.
I don’t think we need to hear divisive misinformation, whoever it’s coming from, and I don’t think the appalling poverty and racist mistreatment endured by the Windrush generation is any justification for perpetuating that approach in the 21st century.

Ah but we don’t have welfare in the UK. We have a system of social security, benefits, as a part of the wider welfare state. And yes it needs reform, it’s no longer fit for purpose, being almost completely hollowed out over the past 14 years.
Incidentally the increase in out of work disability benefits seems to almost exactly mirror the rise in NHS waiting lists so we definitely don’t need less of the welfare state; it needs to be strengthened to stop people falling through the gaps.

I think you’re taking a rosy view. I was at school in the 80s and there were plenty of kids with bad teeth or unwashed clothes.
Poverty isn’t just about having no money. It’s about being drained by the constant struggle to exist and sometimes even the smallest things can be overwhelming. People in that situation need support, not moral judgement, which was very much the ethos of Surestart (and I’d imagine a large contributory factor towards its removal by the coalition government).

Well said!

sure start was still going when mine was very young (born 2010) but was pretty much gone in our area by time he was 2. I used to take ds to some play sessions that were really good, My ds turned out to be autistic, diagnosed at 6, I used to have suspicions when he was younger but there’s no where really to go for advice unless your suspicions are strong enough to warrant a gp visit but then a lot of the time they’d put in down to being a first time mum, same if asking for advice about stuff on Mumsnet when suspicions of autism people say all kids do that. I just think it would have been a good place to ask at the play sessions and get their opinions but maybe I’m looking back with rose tinted glasses having had a very good but short experience of sure start. However it is undeniable that there had been an overall rise in children requiring ehcps at an older age which I firming believe is due to lack of early intervention, be this due to sure start, funding in schools, criteria that school are asssessed on meaning they don’t want children with Sen etc, maybe a combination of them all

Of course it’s not.

Do you think wealthier parents are better parents? Poor parents are shit? Because thats what you’re implying.

To be fair - these services' budgets have also been slashed again and again and again since the time period we're talking about.

I am absolutely a surestart fan but I don't remember them doing a huge amount in terms of early intervention. A few people I know from there back then later had children diagnosed (including my eldest) but this wasn't picked up by the sure start support workers at the time. They did help me a lot with his separation anxiety, but when I had concerns about his eating, sleep and behaviour they just seemed to turn it all around on me and assume I hadn't tried really basic obvious things.

I have no idea why this poster has felt the need to attack you so rudely. I can't only assume they've never volunteered with the public themselves! I can absolutely believe your story. There are unfortunately absolute piss takers and ridiculously entitled people everywhere. During COVID, our local community centre identifed people in need of food bank help and delivered it to their doors. Most of this was done in the staffs own time outside of normal work hours. This had been going on for weeks when one day a delivery driver turned up whilst a colleague of mine was delivering a food parcel, with a delivery of a hot tub! For someone having all their shopping covered by charity. There were numerous other people who needed those food parcels.

I was agreeing with you! It was mostly the middle classes who brought their children to classes etc. Not entirely of course, but they were the vast majority. They then tried “targetted” classes which was a failure. As someone said earlier, no one likes to be lectured.

Well there should be!!!!

My parents weren't educated to degree level and took absolutely no interest in my education whatsoever.

When I asked my mum what to study for GCSES she laughed and said 'Marry a rich man.' I managed to scrape 3 GCSES, then talked my way into college and did A levels.

University was never on the agenda but I accompanied a friend to an event at college about university and went home with some information.

I got into university and luckily got a grant as there's no way my parents would have helped with the costs. I went on to get my Bachelors and Masters.

All this was largely down to luck. I think at school the careers advisor said I may be suitable for secretarial work. No one talked about university to me and I wasn't aware of how to get into various professions, which weren't even on my radar.

’Clever’ kids shouldn’t need uni. With the right support they can go into any career and make a go of it. Marketing uni to poor kids who need to make money immediately is the problem. We need to remove the blockers children have of accessing the support - eg racism, schools not involving small business owners / not helping kids with apprenticeships. Uni is for average intelligence middle class for them to build on their academic knowledge and skills - it never should have become the ‘gold standard’ for every profession.

Well it was the official reason they closed. So perhaps your centre was one of the very, very few exceptions

Not enough though: the reason they closed was because they did not benefit poorer parents to the levels they should have despite being in poor areas and part of this was because wealthier people went and often put parents off. In many cases the centres were designed to put poor people off.

For example every sure start centre in the town I was in (we had 3) was near a council estate when DS was born but the main entrance was always via the car park. This meant people who walked often had to walk further into the centre than people who drove AND often had to walk through lots of Range Rovers and Jaguars to get there. The parenting classes were advertised at all schools, including private schools, and often you’d have a mix of poor parents trying to navigate fsm asking questions in the same groups that wealthier mums asked about private school / nursery admissions.

There was also the point of classes that were always full because mums like me (middle class, desperate with pnd) had them booked for them by health visitors while poorer mums only got told about them and they often had to book them themselves - the queue of parents who lived in the local council estates was often out of the door.

I spoke to my sister who used to work across Sure Start centres and she said it was the same everywhere. The people they wanted to help were families that qualified for fsm but except for a handful of exceptions they rarely did

This is a very interesting thread. I was going to make a very similar point to this. My children are in their 30s now so too old for Sure Start, but we did have an excellent state nursery school in the area, which they both attended. I could hardly believe that something so wonderful was free (back in the early 90s by no means every primary school had a nursery class and playgroups were very hit and miss). The intake was very mixed. The school had been built in the 1930s as an integral part of a big council estate so lots of the children were from the estate, but it also attracted all sorts of families from the older Victorian housing a few streets away who wanted this brilliant start for their 3 and 4 year olds. It had a simple admissions policy - you got in on proximity to the school.

The headteacher was a very down to earth woman, not from a privileged background. She had spent her entire career in nursery education. I became a school governor there and I always remember a meeting where she reported that the LEA was consulting about changing the admissions policy to give priority to children from disadvantaged backgrounds. She was very forthright in saying this would be a disaster. She said the reason the children did so well was because it benefited all the children to learn from each other. The children who'd never had a book read to them learned very quickly from watching others pick up books and leaf through them. Children with poor language and social skills improved at a rate of knots when they had to negotiate with other children to get a turn on the outdoor play equipment. Children learned about each other's languages and cultures through dressing up, special cooking sessions and making cards. And so on. She prevailed (then - I hope it's still the same now).

I think the example of Ireland is pertinent here and contradicts your assumption.

In the late 1960s and 70s and up to the 90s, Ireland funded and built Regional Technical Colleges in towns spread around the country in hopes of providing basically a polytechnic third level training with proper certification to people who weren't interested in a traditional school to academic/ university trajectory, filling a huge gap in education. At the same time, staying in school to age 18 was encouraged.

Simultaneously, the government worked to attract industry to the regions, with various tax incentives and the promise of available trained workforce with qualifications in tech areas such as quality control, etc. Joining the EEC in 1973 was tied to the strategy. German and Dutch owned factories were among the first to locate in Ireland.

The RTCs are now redesignated as Institutes of Technology and award degrees, including masters and doctorates, as well as diplomas and certificates, basically a full range of third level awards.

Joined up thinking goes a long, long way.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutes_of_technology_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland

https://www.tiktok.com/@thagigglebox/video/7206116347531611438?lang=en

Dinner is for dinner.

Giving children choice, made me think of this ^

Haven't RTFT yet but in terms of social mobility and tackling poverty Sweden is in the lead. The state have a lot of control over family life (which is widely accepted) but this would be considered an infringement of human rights in the UK. Eg. all children must go to nursery aged 1, otherwise mothers will lose entitlement to benefits. This means that all children get a fairly equal start in life, and is one of the main reasons social mobility chances are good. I'm on some Universal Credit facebook groups and it's considered against human rights for many that "they're making me look for work" when their child is 3 (and even then it's only 16 hours I think). Tackling childhood poverty starts long before they are born, and if attitudes can be changed before the children are conceived then that is a good thing.
My SIL is a HCP specializing in early years healthcare. Sure Start is still active in our borough, but services have drastically been cut. You can no longer leave your child in the creche (which was very popular) and the only service available is baby/parent classes, in which uptake is very poor. In some ways mandatory attendance wouldn't be a bad thing, the research shows that parental engagement is key for a better childhood outcome. I don't know how that would be enforced though, it's a slippery slope perhaps but too much freedom/autonomy doesn't seem to be helping.

@TheWayTheLightFalls I also have experience of working with food banks and charitable groups and agree with what you say about some people and a sense of entitlement. Despite @PandoraSox 's scepticism, I have come across similar cases and, unfortunately, would have to concur that there is a group who will absorb anything given with no appreciation and no improvement in their overall situation.

It's strange that I had almost exactly this conversation this morning with someone, now in his 40s, who went to a private school on an assisted place. His parents had "normal" jobs, think tradesman/nurse, etc and he commented that the pupils from his year who were most successful were the ones who came from more affluent and educated families as they knew the best opportunities and were encouraged into better options.

www.irishtimes.com/ireland/education/2023/09/19/how-to-engage-with-your-guidance-counsellor/

In Ireland, secondary schools have guidance counselors on staff performing a wide variety of duties. In many schools, their primary function is determining interest and aptitude, and providing advice on post secondary options and how to get where students want to go, using a variety of online resources.

In addition, Irish schools do a transition year between the two national exam cycles, Junior Cert and Leaving Cert, where students do a work experience module among other experiences designed to broaden their social and emotional horizons.

The trouble in the uk though is that the vast majority of nursery is done through private nursery. if the child has Sen or suspected Sen often nurseries refuse to take them or will only take them limited hours as the way Sen funding works makes it difficult to make it sustainable for a nursery to take a child who has additional needs. Arguably the children who would benefit most from a development point of view are most likely to be refused by nurseries. Not blaming nurseries themselves it’s the funding model

Perhaps university should be just for academic and research-focussed careers?

Because there are better ways of achieving all the other things it does. Ways that don't incur vast amounts of debt (or graduate tax).

Yes, before maternelle was compulsory they generally wouldn't accept children who weren't potty trained but now they have to accept all children born in the relevant year and just deal with the ones who can't use the toilet independently yet. One of the children in my son's class isn't quite there yet (December baby) but she has a derogation for the afternoons and only goes in the mornings.

I don't think your DD is likely to be the kind of immigrant the government tend to worry about, and she'll be fully fluent in no time. What a great opportunity for her. With my kids it's the other way round so I'm trying to find opportunities for them to speak English!