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

[Another2Cats]

An article in yesterday's Times (share token below) with this title. I have thoughts both ways on this.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/d2c38325-db32-4e36-a213-6d84be59a2f0?shareToken=58b28456ef3641836cb2ba7f3f70c791

[redacted by MNHQ for copyright reasons]

So at what point do you decide to not help these children?

"35 per cent could not correctly identify Cambridge as a top-flight university."

Did their parents go to Oxford?

@Youcantcallacatspider Another thing that I loved with my child was the free library rhyme-time sessions. Our council now has almost entirely volunteer-led libraries so this has naturally gone.

This must be such a post code lottery, I live in London so I’m sure people jump to the London MC elite tripe but the borough is one of the most deprived areas in the country and it’s coming down with library’s and free library classes. I have 3 libraries within walking distance and they have a toddler/ baby class each day.
Sure starts weren’t a thing with my first I think largely due to covid but now that my second is a baby there is a whole range of council funded support groups, stay and plays or classes, I’ve been pleasantly surprised this time as all I’ve heard is that there is none of this stuff anymore!

That made me laught, @DiscontentedPig

Start at the beginning indeed, I have recently moved to France and the way they treat children is entirely different to the UK. The free services are incredible, MJC centres have incredible clean and engaging activities available for free and free babysitting. Crèche is charged depending on income and is low as 30 cent an hour for poor family’s and maternelle is free and compulsory from three years of age where children get a three course healthy (often organic) meal at lunch time. There are flaws like the shockingly short maternity leave and people complain about the taxes but we could certainly learn something from the French way.

My dd is adopted. Birth parents both fairly below average intelligence and other more specific learning difficulties. No idea what my dd's IQ is but her reading and Maths are both currently way above average and she's a very clever, inquisitive child. I basically never shut up when she was a baby and even now at age 6 we read together for at least 20 minutes to half an hour a day. Intelligence is hereditry but you can make a huge difference with responsive and involved parenting. It's not all about going to university either. It's about being happy, confident and sociable. There's tonnes of evidence that the better you do at school the better your chances with all the above.

The Sure Start children's centres were brilliant. It would be interesting to follow up on the families and children who accessed them and see where they are now.

I live in a very deprived town. We have Family hubs, similar to sure start. They are busy, with poor parents, because they have been placed in the right places and have been advertised in a way that appeals to poor parents, not those well off.

They offer groups that are research based interventions to give the best start. Such as baby massage, art at the start, speech and language groups, dad's groups, school readiness, workshops on feeding baby, being a better parent, cost of living, special needs.

It is all free and open to all. The town is doing so much better in the last 10 years since a lottery funded project was granted.

If anyone wants to know more about what is going on, Google Blackpool betterstart

Unfortunately many children do not have the encouragement from their families to continue with education. There are many clever children who are let down by low expectations. I grew up in a working class area and many kids despite getting good GCSEs would never have considered continuing to A levels as the expectation was to leave school at 16 and work.

I agree with this.

Even as a teenager at the time, I could tell that Tony Blair's mantra of "50% going to university" was an awful policy.

Tbh that started the whole mess we're now in with the financial disaster around university finances.

I’ve yet to see this play out in some of the families I now know through my DH. Grandfathers went to oxbridge, parents did and I’ve never encountered a case where one of their adult children is just stupid and as a direct result struggles with life and their career. Unsurprisingly they still manage to get into successful careers even if they aren’t the most academically bright.
Some of these include people who have all but failed at uni and are still in £400k salaried jobs in their 30s!
Family matters a lot more than ability.

Where I work, they have received government funding for a new programme called Start for Life - aimed at first-time parents who also have mental health problems, English as a second language etc. My job has been to refer people in and the uptake I think has been good. Only funded until March, but fingers crossed it’s extended. I’m too young to have interacted with the Sure Start centres, but SFL will do home visits, 1:1, and support parents from 16/40 until the child is 2.

I read about a pilot project, it was before covid and I can’t find the details on it again. Each support worker had a case load of two families whose children were at risk of being taking into care. They had enough time to help plan bedtime routines and be there to help them establish them, they could teach financial planning, helping them meal plan and go with them to the shops. Lots of hand holding through basic skills. The parents had to sign a parenting contract. It contains things like if your children are not in bed by certain time then they will be taken into care. The project was a last chance saloon for many families to stay together. Fewer children were taken into care than the in the control group. I’ve often wondered what the long term outcomes for those children were. Did the children in the project fair better than those who didn’t?

If you want to make a difference for future children in your position, can I recommend volunteering as an Enterprise Adviser? The role is a lot more flexible that it might appear.

I've been one for a couple of years. It's not been as rewarding as it could have been, the biggest issues being that schools don't fully appreciate what an EA can offer, and the careers role in schools is sadly often still too junior, too part-time, and too focussed on ticking the Gatsby checkmarks. But it's improving.

I'm obviously not saying don't help them, but expecting (and then being surprised when it's not achieved) academic success from the entire population is ridiculous.

There needs to be more focus on vocational skills and careers.

He’s not saying the universities are not for everyone. He’s saying the answer to the question is not obvious to everyone.

have you got peer reviewed research to back that up? Because it reads like bollocks to me. What does ‘wealthier’ mean in your context?

I totally understand why SureStart was popular and why it would work well today too- Health Visitors and GPs are hard to get hold of and the former used to run on vague timings like “sometime on Tuesday afternoon” when mine were kids.

The worst parents wouldn’t be seen anywhere like that but the ones who’d say like a chat about weaning with a professional would be able to have someone discuss it with them.

It’s very simplistic to assume that the worst parents are poor ones. There will be many kids of rich parents under SS radar because of middle class parent privilege.

From my experience as a new mum in 2000s, that was true to a degree. I do remember at the one nearest us in North London that there were classes ringfenced for mums identified as needing more support and I think they were picked up from home by helpers or social workers. There was definitely a pro-active approach to supporting all mums in the community.

There is strong evidence to suggest nurture, especially in the earliest years is more of a factor in terms of intelligence than genetics and certainly genetics is not a factor in attainment.

This comes back to averages doesn't it.

Wasn't there an education Minister a few years ago who said his aim was for all kids to be "above average" and displaying a ridiculous understanding that to be above average, you have to have an average, and people below average.

The challenge is how to help those children who are academically below average still have thriving opportunities. And that's where we come back to the need to prioritise vocational skills and careers.

It's mad to think that Covid lockdowns really highlighted the essential careers - e.g. nursing, care, retail,- even hairdressing - those stuff that we all desperately needed. Yet nothing has changed, its still looked down if someone wants to work in those careers. We need to find ways to show that even in manual or low paid jobs there are opportunities for career progression and that nothing is ever truly a "dead end" job.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104

Intelligence — the ability to learn, reason and solve problems — is at the forefront of behavioural genetic research. Intelligence is highly heritable and predicts important educational, occupational and health outcomes better than any other trait.

I have to agree - you don't need to attend Cambridge or do Maths A Level to be successful and socially mobile so they are ridiculous examples of what's important to know. Also what age children were surveyed? I doubt most younger children would even know what A Levels were!

But there is something in having a broad, wide ranging knowledge and exposure to culture that tends to sit firmly among middle + classes.

Oracy, leadership, confidence - the difference I see between classes here is significant and what I think I would focus on at schools.

On the flip side, children from poorer backgrounds seem to typically "play out" from a younger age and be more responsible for their own well-being, which can lead to good resilience and problem solving.

I teach in a very deprived area of the country and to be perfectly frank, people need help. Unless support is put in from birth then the cycle will never break. Child support services are desperately oversubscribed, thresholds for intervention are incredibly high and some people either do not know or do not have the capacity to parent their children.

I think Wes Streeting has previously made quite a lot of noise about the social benefits middle class children have that are often not fully appreciated - travel, visits to museums/art galleries, theatre, new experiences etc. Again, I fully agree with this and I wish that if the parents can't provide these, we could find better ways for schools to. Around here the "better" schools do some of this, but not at a high level. And schools like the ones my DS is at are vey focused on in-school currently so there's just little or no spare resources for this. Which is a pity.