What is ‘deprivation’

[0None0]

It’s such a common term. I have my own idea what it means, but would like to hear other ideas. A lot of people and situations described as ‘deprived’ I would not consider to be deprived

@WrongWayApricot

You can't just build on parking spaces though, most of them in London are in front of houses already. You're just going to make a bunch of horridly narrow alleyways and give people tiny houses that have to be one room across and so close to the road they won't have any pavement?

OP is going to move all the houses, obvs.

Move half the houses to the left, and half to the right. Then big green space in the middle.

I’m Scottish and work in Scottish education and we have the SHANARRI framework. Lacking in any of these areas would be classed as deprivation.

Safe
Healthy
Achieving
Nurtured
Active
Respected
Responsible
Included.

Children should be all of these things and if they are not it needs to be addressed as they are deprived is what is important to be a growing child.

@JesusInTheCabbageVan 🤣🤣 yeah silly me

@NeverDropYourMoonCup

How exactly am
I ‘responsible’ for lack of heating and hot water if I couldn’t afford to replace the boiler and had to save up for a couple of years?

There may be time help now in some circumstances for home owners, but there wasn’t then

@pointythings

What really concerns me is that if OP is a teacher, she will be failing so many vulnerable children by not reporting concerns so that those families can be signposted to support. Someone with that attitude should not be in the classroom - and certainly should not be a foster parent.

If children disclose they have no heating or hot water this is listed in their records like everything else

I had a conversation with a safeguarding lead at the school today

She confirmed she is aware of various grants etc, and that information is freely available but none if the 3 (4 including g staff) families I know in the school without boilers are eligible

I asked if this was considered a safe guarding concern.

Basically no

She said if the family are tenants, they are entitled to gas and electricity, but if they are homeowners, they are not

Not having gas is not a safeguarding concern

Not having electricity is not a safeguarding concern

Not having gas OR electricity is potentially a safe guarding concern in the event of a SWEP notice

I asked why theses things are listed in children’s records if not considered a safe guarding concern

For information

I suppose a teacher might look more leniently on a request to have priority use of the shower, or to have a phone charged

@WrongWayApricot

You can't just build on parking spaces though, most of them in London are in front of houses already. You're just going to make a bunch of horridly narrow alleyways and give people tiny houses that have to be one room across and so close to the road they won't have any pavement?

You can’t use all parking spaces, no, not directly, but in many cases you can.

More than half the non residential parking spaces in London could be directly used for accommodation.

Much if the rest could be rerationalised

So I’m confused... do you want to help those who have no heating and hot water or do you think it’s not a necessity and they should just suck it up? This extra housing you want to provide in London built on parking spaces... will it have heating and hot water?

@Ifitquacks

So I’m confused... do you want to help those who have no heating and hot water or do you think it’s not a necessity and they should just suck it up? This extra housing you want to provide in London built on parking spaces... will it have heating and hot water?

Yes! I think the heating and hot water has been a bit if a red herring really.

I was just saying earlier that there have been times when I considered myself deprived ( homeless- sleeping rough) abs times when we would have been classed as deprived, but I don’t really think we were. Abs gave the example of very low income, no boiler.

You can have a perfectly good home without a boiler, washing in cold water - it isn’t a big issue , except if there is mildew etc, which is obviously different, and puts a home in the category of ‘unsafe’

My point was that the major issue for children and families, well everyone really, is decent housing, and I really think this should be the main priority

I’ve seen literally millions wasted in education addressing ‘deprivation’ and I really think a lot of it is misplaced

We need to provide clean, safe, stable secure housing for our whole population, and a lot of other issues will resolve themselves

Private car ownership is part of this debate because if the staggering scale if the space cars take up, especially when parked, which is generally more than 96% of their life

If parking spaces in big cities was rerationalised and repurposed for homes, then not only would far fewer people need cars as they would be able to live close to work, but also we would be taking steps to protect the environment

We are in a lunatic situation in which many people can’t have decent, convenient homes because do many people drive to work.

Spoken like a true city dweller or at the very least with access to public transport

@KateTheEighth

Spoken like a true city dweller or at the very least with access to public transport

I am speaking specifically about London, as I said

Good luck persuading the government to invest in excellent public transport for all. I live in a small town, so not rural and in the middle of nowhere. No train station. The buses all stop running at 5. Nothing runs on a Sunday. Given that compared to some places we have it relatively good, can you imagine the staggering cost of running public transport across the UK to the point where it is actually becomes possible for people to live without cars? I know it's possible - I've lived that way in my native Netherlands - but it isn't going to happen here. And I would LOVE it to happen.

@pointythings

Good luck persuading the government to invest in excellent public transport for all. I live in a small town, so not rural and in the middle of nowhere. No train station. The buses all stop running at 5. Nothing runs on a Sunday. Given that compared to some places we have it relatively good, can you imagine the staggering cost of running public transport across the UK to the point where it is actually becomes possible for people to live without cars? I know it's possible - I've lived that way in my native Netherlands - but it isn't going to happen here. And I would LOVE it to happen.

This is it, it does happen In many places, and it could happen here. And it eventually will, when car ownership becomes obsolete.

We should be starting to turn in that direction now though, it will take time

Again I’m confused... are we making car ownership obsolete just in London, or the whole of the U.K.?
Where I live the public transport is absolutely shit and most people drive. Cars are generally all parked on private driveways. Ours has parking for 3 cars although we only have 1. Would places like this have to give up their driveways for new houses to be built on, in your world? We could probably fit a 1 bed studio on our drive, but it would block our front window 🤷🏻‍♀️.
I was going to say to go into politics you need to be clear on your views and policies but actually, looking at who we currently have in power that’s blatantly not true, so maybe you’ll succeed .

The only reason public transport is so good in the Netherlands is that they spent their Marshall Aid on rebuilding from the ground up. It was a once in a lifetime financial opportunity. The UK spaffed theirs on clinging to their failing Empire - the chance will not come again. Brexit will shrink the UK's economy and its opportunities, and let's face it - our current government aren't about making life better for ordinary people.

And even in the Netherlands, there are areas where public transport is not sufficient to allow for effective daily life without a car.

If we are all to go without cars how will the millions of us who do not live near workplaces get on? It would take me 90 mins to get to work via public transport. What would happen to my children if I had to leave at 7am? Presently I drop DC at breakfast club at 8am and drive to work in 25 minutes. Modern life needs private transport. Life was even crazier when I had nursery and school drop offs. And that's not me even talking about rural life.

And anyway, there'd be nowhere for me to put on my make-up if I didn't do it at traffic lights

Just to be clear. I am not advocating the end of private car ownership. I am stating that it is inevitable. I am advocating that we speed it up to help solve the housing crisis and the environmental crisis. If it was t going to happen anyway, I would be advocating more mitigation, rather than outright abolition

Well, when I lived in London was still faster and cheaper in my tiny car to drive to work.

A 25 min drive would have taken an hour and a half on busses, tubes and walking, and would have cost me fqr more than filling the tank for £35 every 6 weeks.

Plus, I didn’t fancy a 3 hour round commute a day with waking thrown in as well when I was working 13 hour nightshifts.

So car ownership is a necessity for people in
cities too.

Also, public transport has to be better and cheaper too as more and more people on low incomes are priced out of living in cities but still have to commute in to do minimum wage work.

@Puffalicious

If we are all to go without cars how will the millions of us who do not live near workplaces get on? It would take me 90 mins to get to work via public transport. What would happen to my children if I had to leave at 7am? Presently I drop DC at breakfast club at 8am and drive to work in 25 minutes. Modern life needs private transport. Life was even crazier when I had nursery and school drop offs. And that's not me even talking about rural life.

And anyway, there'd be nowhere for me to put on my make-up if I didn't do it at traffic lights

This is what has to change though. Many people have chosen jobs and homes in the basis of an assumption tney will always be able to drive a car.

The next generation will not be able to make that assumption.

To be fair, this generation shouldn’t either.

Those if you saying you need your cats, what happens if you get a vertigo attack tomorrow, and lose your licence?

*cars, not cats

OP I am glad you recognised a previous poster’s suggestion that perhaps your own experiences are skewing your view of deprivation, and that you don’t want to acknowledge you may have unwittingly exposed your own children to this. I think this is spot on. Please please go and reflect on this, and on the contact you have with children as a teacher. I do understand the point I think you are making - that people making policies sometimes put their effort in the wrong place. But the solutions you are suggesting (like giving people a fridge) seem staggeringly naive for someone who’s had your experience. I haven’t lived like that, but I have worked with families in very difficult situations over my 20 year career as a midwife, andI teach student midwives now about deprivation so that they can look for the kinds of situations people are writing about here, and do something about them.

To arsebucket and others on the thread who have posted about very difficult childhood experiences, I really hope things are better now.

I bought a property I could afford AFTER I had had my job for many years. I couldn't keep my flat as I had had children. If I was to live near my school I couldn't afford it. If I couldn't drive I'd need to give up work. Are you saying that after 26 years in a school where I know the families inside out I should just give up? I don't want to work anywhere else. I drive a small car, that i hope to trade for electric soon, and live my.life the way millions of others do. Unfortunately you, like so many others, are London centric: life isn't like it is in London in the rest of the country. Cars may be obsolete at some point, but not in my lifetime or my children's, I reckon..

Your fridge idea is, as PP, have intimated, absurd. Don't go into politics.

@0None0

*cars, not cats

Clearly, many of them would become unemployed.

The job I accepted was one where there is a bus service. That service takes five times longer to get there than by car if you leave by 6.30am. If I were travelling during standard commuting hours, a car would take about 4 minutes longer, but the buses would either fail to stop because they were full from 7.15-9.25am and if they did, the journey time increases to 'well, you'll get there at some point this morning, unless there are roadworks or an accident - in which case you might as well not bother'.

I didn't accept the better paid job that meant 2 buses where the services are regularly cancelled at the first hint of weather due to the terrain and then a 45minute walk up a selection of steep hills, including a 25% one, or a 25minute walk across deserted fields in the dark from October to March. And countless others where I didn't apply in the first place because it's either clear they impossible to get to or where they put down 'due to the location, it is essential that applicants have a full driving licence and their own transport'. There are many locations within a 10 to 30 minute drive of this part of Greater London which literally have no public transport, so might as well not exist for people who are poor and looking for work or who are disabled (before you tell me it would be easy for anybody to cycle), even if you ignore the journey time of 25 minutes by car compared to 2h45m by walk, wait, bus, traffic jam, wait, train, train delay, wait, train cancellation, wait, train, delay outside the station, walk, get threatened with the sack for not getting up in time to get to work because it's 9.25am and you left the house just after 6.

When you can get from London to the West Country in the time it takes to go less than ten miles (and can't ride or don't want to become another news item about a woman killed whilst cycling - there's a good reason why those reports rarely saying 'leaving two children' - mothers don't want their kids to have to grow up without them), many, many people do need cars to get and keep jobs even in Greater London.