To wonder what else can be done to break the cycle of generations living off benefits?

[Allonthesametrain]

Sounds harsh because It is. As a former teacher, then eduation social worker, now the past few years more heavily involved with school attendance.

My desire has always been to help children from unprivileged backgrounds to know their worth and achieve the best they can and this has been my career from age 23 to 57.

The number of times I've cried, torn my hair out, is immeasurable. I and colleagues have gone above and beyond to support the families, genuinely care about them, but unfortunately the outcome has been, as I've said in title, it's a continiation of the cycle of being brought up within a small community and low expectations.

So many gorgeous kids (supported throughout their young lives until they leave school) who tell you their dreams of what they want to to achieve in life, we do everything we can to enable it and some have indeed broken out of the circle but unfortunately the reality has been...

Parents who live lifestyles of no bedtime routine, tell their kids not to come back before ...pm, sleep in and don't get them out of bed ready and fed for school and as for weekends, pub and take back a new bloke

Parents who have issues themselves and project them onto DC. The kids soon realise they can stay off school for feigning illness and would actually be a comfort to Mum

The parents who just cba and say shall we just still in bed?

Of course there are so many other mitigating factors but these are the 3 main experiences we've dealt with. Unfortunately it really does come down to poor parenting and no matter what interventions we do to encourage attendance, only a minority are genuine.

So the cycle...DC think education isn't important, parents are hopeless role models and can often be aggressive to teachers, a deflection of blame.

Then oh DD gets pregnant at age 15, DS has been reprimanded by the police for scooting around in a balaclava. Then pure hostility when we try to continue to talk to them and what could be done to help.

Basically it's just such a shame, these sweet young kids who say they want to be ... become so influenced by their homelife, a need to fit in with their family and peers from the same estate, that they ignore the support we give them, don't turn up to appointments etc.

For the genuine cases, DC with SEN, the effort to try and ensure they are in best place is utmost and it's heartbreaking there aren't enough of them. Yes, we do know genuine cases and not just so many parents striving for a diagnosis because they feed DC a terrible diet and let them stay up late so are tired and irritable at school.

Expecting some backlash, whatever anyone says I can reason with.

But the fraud rate relates to (eg) somebody using another persons identity to claim. Not people exaggerating symptoms to claim PIP etc

What happens if we choose not to afford the welfare state?

What do you understand by "the welfare state".

Bear in mind that you advocated cutting the welfare state earlier in the thread.

1. We don’t ‘choose not to afford it’, we can’t afford it. And it’s not binary - we can make cutbacks without burning the whole thing down.
2. The common ordinary meaning - benefits and pensions.

Wrong on both counts. Presumably you didn't read my well argued and informed points earlier re percentage of GDP/government spending on benefits and pensions over the last decades. That's a shame because it would have increased your understanding.

The welfare state encompasses such services as health and education. No need to argue that one; you'd be wrong. So again. What would happen if we CHOSE not to afford the welfare state? What might happen to you?

@MistressoftheDarkSide You mean like Yosser in Boys from the Black Stuff? Gizza job!!! Worth a try for old times sake.

Yeah which is significantly better then it has been do you want things to improve or do you just want to moan about it. Just like single mums could stay home and claim until their child was 16 its now 3. How there use to restrictions on how many hours you work now there isn't. How you didn't use to be able to work on lcwra now you can. How lcwra has been cut in half for under 25s. And im sure more will change but it takes time.

I thought LCWRA was being stopped for people under 25 (or was it 22?), and halved for new claimants of any age?
Am happy to be corrected if wrong on that.

In fact single parents were very much discouraged from working at one point - that way the unemployment figures looked slightly less dire. Governments use benefits as a means of socio-economic control and that's something a lot of turkeys posters on here cheer on!

I suspect a lot of that is coming from people who 'just did' this or that at the start of their working lives some years ago. I certainly did, but I am acutely aware that I entered the full time workforce in 1993. Plenty of jobs about and on a low wage (not NMW, that didn't exist at all) I could afford a decent flat on my own. At the age of 18. I was a care assistant in a nursing home at the time. Can't imagine anyone in a similar job today renting on their own with no parental help today.

4 years later, with my fiancé, we bought a house. In 1997, they were chucking mortgages at anyone and everyone. We got a 95% mortgage on a 3 bedroomed house. Although we would later be better earners, at the time, neither of us had massively high wages. On the equivalent today, there's no way we could have afforded that house today.

We were both able to improve our circumstances because there was so much more mobility in the job market. It was a LOT easier to move into different employment spheres without much experience specifically in a different field. General work experience carried a lot more weight than it does now.

I couldn't do what I did then if I was starting out now.

@OneTealShaker

Well I did work for many years. Full time as a TA. Then I discovered if I stopped working full time and stayed at home I would receive just as much PLUS £500 more.

Anyway, before you get your knickers in a twist I’m returning to work in September. Not as a TA as my youngest starts secondary school thank the lord, I don’t need that job anymore. I am lucky that I have the means and capacity to find a better paid job.

Which brings me back to one of my original points. Not everyone has the capacity to just find a better job. Why am I better off not working as a TA when that’s a valuable contribution to society? Why does that not pay? I have three children and was counting every penny working full time. If you cant work out why someone would choose this option with three children then …. I have no words

LCWRA isn't being scrapped for under 22s yet - the govt wanted to and haven't ruled out enacting that particular piece of discrimination post Timms review. Anyone who is disabled or cares about disabled rights should be pretty scared of what Mr Timms will have to say. The consultation is a farce.

Ah ok, that makes sense.
Yes, it is all awful. I think they still want to go ahead with the 4 point rule to get PIP, along with scrapping the WCA and making LCWRA reliant on getting PIP (which will conveniently be harder to get). It is going to plunge so many people into poverty, and flood the job market with people that no employer will touch.

Yet you get people on here rubbing their hands in glee at the thought, and will be expecting to see more money in their pocket once the changes come in.

The DWP's definition of fraud is actually broader than that, but that's not the only reason I don't acecpt that we are bankrolling hordes of scroungers who have no intention of working. The process of claiming and staying on benefits (not to mention making ends meet on them) is so difficult that it's ludicrous to suggest people can just sign on to UC at will, get accepted and doss around not working and not showing any evidence of seeking work. They're required to show proof they're actively seeking it or their benefits are cut.

And as far as PIP is concerned, yes sometimes you do hear of people exaggerating symptoms, but given how difficult it is to obtain PIP in the first place I'm extremely sceptical that a significant number of people have managed to pull that off. That's not gullibility, I'm basing my viewpoint on the realities of what claiming/staying on benefits is like, unlike some.

I'd imagine all the cuts to disability benefits that Mr Starmer couldn't get across the line last year are all waiting in the wings. Have you seen the call for evidence? I consider myself reasonably intelligent but I couldn't work out what they were getting at. There wasn't much room to write what needed to be said either. I suppose if we have a new PM by autumn there might be a glimmer of hope but otherwise, not really. The government has spent a lot of time and effort convincing the public that PIP is an alternative to work, that certain conditions don't count as disability and that PIP is allocated according to condition and not how it affects the individual. They won't want all that to go to waste.

I think since UC was rolled out, that there's been an issue with organised criminal gangs making mass false claims. There's little or no evidence to suggest high levels of fraud among individual claimants. Although if there is fraud , I'd imagine a lot of it is because benefit levels are unsustainably low, especially for single claimants.

My DC is adopted, they have learning difficulties, they are hypervigilant and have school anxiety, they are probably neuro divergent too but I haven't had them assessed yet. Once they're at school they are extremely compliant, they don't disrupt the class at all, they sit there quietly, but they don't retain a single thing that has been said and are totally dysregulated at the end of the day. We get up at 6.45am but I often struggle to get my child to school on time due to school anxiety, I regulate my child at home before the school day starts, depending on how they woke up it can take anything from 15 minutes to an hour + to regulate them, I've been told by the teacher we will have to get up earlier. If I take my child to school dysregulated so we're there on time I am often still at the school until 10.30 before they will take them from me. It's in my child's EHCP that they should have 1:1 check ins through out the day and 1:1 time to regulate with a familiar mos at least twice a day, they have never had this despite my DC's therapist training the school. They are also meant to have either 1:1 support or work in small groups of 1-4 for core subjects however due to another child's behaviour, this did not happen last week. The only 1:1 support they have ever had is ELSA support. My child's therapy is funded through adoption support however the budget has been cut so the amount of hours have been halved.

It's not always the parent's of children who are failing them, it's teachers, schools and the government too and if things don't change soon, it's very likely my child will struggle to work / get a job when older. Maybe if we moved away from the middle class area we're in teachers would care about them more but as things are, other than me no one gives a flying fuck whether my child achieves or not, they just need to be in school on time.

Why on earth did they have to lift the 2 child cap if the welfare state is unaffordable.

i don’t agree that they did anyway

Because you like to see easily preventable child poverty? Or because you think that a falling birth rate is best addressed by "encouraging" people to have small families?

Thank you, you absolutely get it.

The 80s and 90s were vastly different in terms of cost of living and bureaucracy around work.

As a late teen and in my 20s back then, I was in a similar position. Now 57 I am basically obsolete and tech progression has left me far behind.

The younger generations are being painted as entitled and workshy, yet the article I posted above gives a good overview of systemic barriers preventing them from getting a foot in the door. If the more able and willing are struggling, what of the even more vulnerable?

It is absolutely an employers market. All this talk of generational lack of aspiration and how to essentially punish people out of it smacks of sadism, and completely overlooks how much and how fast the world has and us changing. We're not wired for it psychologically and our systems and infrastructure can barely keep up either. The Luddites were focused on this, not because they were against progress per se, but because they recognised the destabilising effects of progress without buffering during the transition. They were very much on the money IMHO.

I think we are also suffering from this obsession with one size fits all education.
when I was at school we were streamed and the lower band did some GCSEs and some vocational training. Now everyone has to do a full timetable of GCSEs, the kids are disengaged and disruptive.

Fair enough, you’re entitled to your view. You just sound defeated and defeatist to me. I applied for a job once, didn’t get it. Had a business once, got screwed over. Nothing works, everything’s impossible, if you’re optimistic you have no clue.

There's a difference between optimistic and delusional.

Here we go again...

Because it’s Labour and they’ve always believed in the magic money tree for the cant be helped

Another fan of child poverty! You are swimming against the tide.