How would you tackle child poverty and improve outcomes?

[Cindyyyy]

I would back:

• free basic school meals for all from 3 (extras can be paid for) of healthy, veg-based, minimally-processed meals
• investment into school-based pre-school, to be free for all from age 3
• increase school funding massively, pay rises for teachers and nursery staff, investment and subsidies into training
• increase number of SEN schools and in-school SEN provision, as well as PRUs
• subsidised holiday clubs for all parents working full time
• extend SureStart, increase reviews by health visitors. If a child isn’t meeting milestones, earlier intervention and increased checks
• expand apprenticeships

You?

Your c&p comes from a socialist source. Do you think the country would be better off if we had more poor people coming, or more wealthy business owners, or just wealthy people full stop?

The wealthiest people/families in the UK are all business owners, creating thousands of jobs domestically and globally.

You personally have more wealth than 50% of the planet’s population; how would you feel if you were required to give up half of your wages/assets to alleviate global poverty?

Le Corbusier has a hell of a lot to answer for.

I agree. So many children could be making a start on useful adult lives instead of being forced to study Shakespeare. It’s not for everyone.

I say that as an English teacher. But really, I feel for the teenagers made to stay on at school when it’s quite obviously an environment that isn’t right for them after 15.

‘Expose yourself as a conservative’.

Tell me you’re small-minded without telling me etc etc.

@Araminta1003
University is more than what you learn there, it is also about initiation in to adulthood and is about social mobility, not just in terms of the jobs you get. A child from a poorer background going to uni gets to mix and potentially then marry into more wealth and education.

That isn’t the general view on mumsnet - there have been numerous posts saying their dc have concerns about going to such and such university as they’re terrified they might have to mix with poshos and public school students.

Exactly this. I understand genuine financial hardship exists, but speaking from experience, there’s a different problem when parents choose substances over their children.

On our local news recently, they had a feature where schools were showing the “cost of living crisis” by showcasing actual photos of kids lunchboxes. They were saying look at the poor parents “unable” to give their kids a proper lunch whilst inserting a picture of where some moronic parent just chucked a few of last nights chips in the box. It angered me because that is not an issue of a cost of living crisis, that’s neglect.

Perhaps if we stopped treating grown adults as victims of their own life choices, we might start getting somewhere.

This is absolutely the crux of the problem and no government has been able to solve it.

How do you get past awful parents to give children the help they need? It’s heartbreaking to see children trapped with cruel or neglectful parents who put their own needs before the children they’ve thoughtlessly brought into the world.

Some parents just cannot be trusted - and we need to admit that.

I saw this year after year in the schools I worked at.

The problems:

• parents spending money on drugs/ alcohol.
• parents who never learnt delayed gratification
• parents who have so feelings of self efficacy

Drugs can be solved by better policing. The other two, I believed can be solved by making work actually pay, not having a life on benefits as an option.

The reason kids at our schools breakfast club do better is because the parents knew that the payoff of getting kids out of the house 40 minutes earlier would save them a few much needed pounds every week. Generally, those kids also had at least one parent working.

Other parents just dropped their kids off hungry at the usual time, or late, knowing that the school had food because we ran breakfast club. Those kids missed the first part of the day while we arranged something for them to eat.

I do think if the labour party really cared about children there would be limits on what the money could be spent on. It doesn't sound 'nice' though and people will cry that it's cruel, when the currently system is ultimately cruel to children.

And make "early help" referrals compulsory rather than optional if a family refuses the help.

Would it really penalise you though if all places do let you use vouchers? I don't see the issue and the payoff would be HUGE for children whose parents who spend money at the betting shop, alcohol, drugs.

As a society we have to work together for the common good.

What source is that then? I purposely put the points in bold so that you didn't miss them!

Why are you referring to immigrants, this thread is about tackling child poverty- you are showing your true colours there!

Your statement, "The wealthiest people/families in the UK are all business owners, creating thousands of jobs domestically and globally." doesn't alter the fact that the very wealthy remain so because of passive gains and rentals. If passive gains grow faster than wages, inequalities grow and the distribution of wealth is concentrated on a small proportion of the population. By default their political influence is going to be disproportionately high and this damages democracy as the poorest interests are not represented.

Your last paragraph is a false equivalence as most people in the Western Economies are not in receipt of the passive income streams so half of their wealth would be a very high proportion of their income and value of their home, this would push more people into the 'have nots' and would widen the wealth gap even more. This is why we are seeing the demise of both the middle classes and the working classes as the 1% of people now own 70% of the countries wealth and it is only going to get worse on this trajectory.

"Your last paragraph is a false equivalence as most people in the Western Economies are not in receipt of the passive income streams so half of their wealth would be a very high proportion of their income"

I wasn't talking about the world, I was talking about you, and the UK. The majority of people in the UK do have passive income, whether that's direct cash benefits or indirect service provision which is absolutely a receipt which most of the rest of those in poverty do not have, and is often cited as part of the reason we have such high migration from poorer countries. Over 50% of UK residents are net receivers; they receive more from the state (ie other people) than they will financially contribute. The very definition of passive income.

So we've gone from it's fair to take money from the rich to help the poor, to it's okay to take their money because they won't even really notice.

Giving thousands to feckless parents who prioritise other things than their children will not make them magically better parents. DF was an addict; the spending on him over his lifetime must have been phenomenal and it made not one jot of difference, other than helping to keep several medical and social professionals in work, so I suppose that was his contribution.

"Talking about you" what do you mean?

Why are you talking about migration again?

It's really apparent that you haven't understood my point as your replies don't make any sense.

As someone who works in finance…how are you balancing this? What are you cutting to fund it or where is the additional money coming from?

Stoneblock · 01/10/2025 12:40
I've spent a lot of time working with children in poverty and my honest opinion is that you're barking completely up the wrong tree in your points, except Sure Start which made a real difference until it was mostly scrapped under austerity.
Universal fsm and childcare is very expensive and mostly benefits people who aren't in poverty.

You highlight another persistent problem for governments: balancing the need to focus limited resources on the genuinely needy and the wish to avoid stigmatisation. Lots of money is (I think) wasted on making all kinds of things universal when they don't need to be.

In the schools I worked in fsms were very discreetly managed. Some parents might have hazarded a guess at which children had fsm, but no-one ever breathed a word to either the children or other adults. There's no need for it to be universal just to avoid the risk of stigmatisation.

We're not a thriving economy any more and resources ARE limited. I think we need to stop being squeamish about targeting money where it's needed.

I agree I see people say meals should be free for everyone to reduce the stigma but most schools have an online booking system and there’s no way anyone knows who is paying and who isn’t. Not even the actual child needs to know, I’ve told my 7 year old I pay for his meals just in case he ever blurts something out and embarrasses himself.

Even when I was at secondary school nobody knew who had free lunches because lunch was paid for through a finger print system. It’s been a very long time since there was a stigma

The focus on benefits exclusively is wrong, the fact is being 'poorer' is being felt by all classes or sections of society as the concentration of wealth 70 % is owned by 1%. In the mid- 70s, 22% was owned by the richest 1%. You don't have to be a Socialist to see why things have gone wrong!

We need economic growth to lift people out of poverty and raise everyone's standard of living, it is harder to achieve this if wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few. We should reform the tax system to something like the Entrepreneurial tax system that was introduced in Denmark this year, it gives tax breaks to start ups and encourages innovation by initiatives like, dividend tax exemption for unlisted portfolio shares under 10%, an increased R&D tax‑credit cap, and relaxation of the researcher tax scheme salary requirement. It is talking action that is productive rather than succumbing to political pressure from those with the most influence spinning stories about benefit scroungers.

@Goldenbear - most of us are clearly not in the 1% but we understand that when you tax the 1% more than in comparable countries (which there are plenty now), then we end up the ones paying even more tax! So no thanks with regard to a return to the 70s. As you point out, we are all feeling the pinch and cost of living. The MN demographic especially, a lot of us are handing over 60% plus of our income already. There comes a point where you start draining talent at the middle class level and I hate to break it to you, but we are there already!

And yes poor people and poor children are everyone’s problem! When we do not try and deal with it, our own kids just end up paying for it eventually. So whether you approach the question from a selfish or unselfish point of view, the outcome is the same.
We need businesses to do more to life children out of poverty by offering job training schemes too. This is starting to take off more and more now. I do have some hopes. If tax incentives need to be offered, offer them. Kids from certain backgrounds need to be shown there is an alternative out there.

Can you really lift yourself up off the boot straps?

yes and no. Those estates are grim. But they were meant to be a break from the grim terraces which were grim because of overcrowding, poverty etc. It is the poverty both financial and of imagination, that makes places hideous. If your neighbours dump broken furniture outside the front door, break windows when drunk and locked out and piss in the lifts, no amount of beauty in the architecture will stop a place looking like a shithole.

We also need to radically shift the collective mindset,

Thatcher said 'There is no such thing as society' and (paraphrase) 'if you see someone over 26 taking the bus, you can safely assume they are losers'.

This attitude dug its claws into our society.

But group mindsets can change. It used to be oh so cool to drink and drive. Then it became uncool. Then it became the sign of a bad friend if you allowed a drunk mate to get behind a wheel. Ditto with seatbelts. Used to be only for fusspots. Then a bit cheeky to flout the law. Now it's a character defect if you don't strap your kids in, in the backseat.

We need a massive campaign to remind people that making money is neither the only nor the ultimate life goal and that making way more money than you need is a serious character defect if you don't use it to benefit society. because there IS such a thing as society. We need to campaign for legal policies that support restructuring the shareholders before safety and welfare of staff and customers. We need to promote a general attitude that sharing and spreading your wealth is a sign of outstanding and admirable character. Not hoarding it Bezos style. We should all mock the sad wankers who keep clawing away at their moneypots like scrooge pre-ghosting. I don't care if they still need to show off a bit, splashing the cash by putting their names to well-built, affordable social housing schemes, new hospital wings, libraries, parks. But the 'I have such big bollocks - look at my rocket to Mars' machismo of gathering wealth needs to move towards 'Look how I share my wealth. Look how far it goes.'

It should be SO cool to run a major company that pays all its staff living wage and double for overtime. To run a major company that ploughs its profits into building creches and having on-site medical surgeries, gyms etc, instead of squeezing everyone at the bottom of the pile to boast about profits for shareholders, when the buildings are crumbling and the staff working unpaid overtime to prove their great work ethic in the hop of a title only, no-pay-rise promotion.

And to those who say the very richest are the business owners, the ones who create jobs. yes, true. But where does the wealth come from? Poorer people buying their products, workers claiming universal credit because the wages they pay are not enough to live on. The rich would not stay rich if they relied for their wealth on their own tiny coterie. They need oiks like us to keep buying their coffee/chocolate/booze/perfume/cereal/sofas/teeshirts.

“We need a massive campaign to remind people that making money is neither the only nor the ultimate life goal and that making way more money than you need is a serious character defect if you don't use it to benefit society.”

What exactly classifies as making way more money than you “need”?
Most people are making a bit more than necessary and paying shedloads of tax in this country. A very lucky few have millions and millions. But most very wealthy families do put legacy first eventually once they realise their own mortality. That has always been a thing.
We need people to work hard and be ambitious and keep the fruits of their labour somewhat. Otherwise there is no incentive to be productive whatsoever. I personally have stopped working more because of taxes and I cannot be the only one. I do not have a greedy mindset as to worldly goods but it would probably be better for society if I did!

yes and no. Those estates are grim. But they were meant to be a break from the grim terraces which were grim because of overcrowding, poverty etc. It is the poverty both financial and of imagination, that makes places hideous. If your neighbours dump broken furniture outside the front door, break windows when drunk and locked out and piss in the lifts, no amount of beauty in the architecture will stop a place looking like a shithole.

@Cinaferna UK does not have infinite space so tower blocks make more sense.
Nonetheless as you said dumping furniture etc. does not make for a nice neighbourhood and tower blocks are seen as less desirable places to live.
For example in the World’s End estate which is in Chelsea, flats of around 800 sq ft with 2 beds & 1 bathroom in the tower blocks fetch £500 - £600,000, whereas flats in neighbouring terraces or Victorian mansion blocks of same size and bedrooms etc fetch between £1000,000 - £1200,000.
The terraced houses were grim when they were overcrowded and without santition but nowadays former slums in London are valuable properties.