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.

In my first job interview I was asked where I skied. Not if I skied but where. Things have progressed in the intervening 25 years, but class signifiers still loom large for many professions. The British middle classes are absolutely ruthless at determining whether you are one of us - a slip of the accent, a misunderstood reference, and you’ll out yourself. The shibboleths are many and varied.

I do wonder where some posters live if they can’t identify local families where generations have never worked! It is a massive issue.

Well that was unnecessary.

No, no it is not a "massive issue". It is a divisive myth designed to pit the "hard working" against the feckless while ignoring the growing structural inequalities, negation of social mobility and sky rocketing transfer of wealth upwards to the already rich. It is a strategy that panders to eugenecists and designed to create a self fulfilling prophecy amongst the alleged "underclasses" and prime the population for "hard choices" subtly underpinned by growing right wing ideologies.

I live on the edges of a historically rough council estate. I see more right to buy properties with tradesmens vans, and traveller made good homes than anything else. Yes, there are the odd gaggles of teens playing at gangs, but you see them in their school uniforms when Monday rolls round.

The roughest hotspots are the affluent town centre where upper middle class kids are doing and dealing coke and ket.

Most local homeless are middle aged with chronic mental health issues that they self medicate.

Additionally, the younger generations are leveraging online platforms to generate income more than people realise, so while they may seem to be "failing" at mainstream, they're side hustling - there may be a moral debate to be had about some of the sources of income, but if the only goal in life is to make money, who cares eh?

Problem areas were created when councils started pushing "problematic" families all together in certain areas / estates, however, right to buy changed things considerably.

The problems we are facing now are precious little to do with a "genetic" underclass, and far more to do with the so rapid changes in work, the cost of living, the speed of technological progress, and difficulty in maintaining communities that used to have funded provisions for youth services, further education, libraries etc which have all been decimated in favour of private enterprise that focuses only on profit, not people.

Yes, in our rabid capitalist dystopia, there will always be those who struggle, and "make the place look untidy" however, the myth of hoardes of families who have "never worked" is just that - a myth. It suits people to have a target when their lives feel precarious and they feel powerless in the face of successions of self serving and ineffectual governments that are far more interested in licking the corporate boot for kick backs than anything else.

History is absolutely repeating itself on the roughly 80 year cycle of rise and fall. And it's not the fault of "families who have never worked".

Yes. Though also there's been significant underinvestment in infrastructure for the North (access to capital, transport, 5G roll out and R&D/education have all favoured the South), which makes it harder for "captains of industry", or even local people considering a start up, to develop a fledging business. More investment in transport and northern universities in particular would be useful and some sort of partnership with investors to get them to see potential in the
North.

Many MNers seem to believe that if it doesn't happen in their leafy enclave then it doesn't happen at all. They have no reason to meet these families at all so can't comprehend that they exist.

If you haven’t already. Please read Poor by Katriona O’Sullivan. A truly remarkable woman who grew up in abject poverty & abuse in Coventry & has become an advocate for young women from deprived communities. Her book should be required reading for teachers & social workers.

That is a fantastic and sincere response to what I suspect is a click baity post. See also the refs to reduced teenage pregnancy, a problem long ago solved. People aren't interested in the evidence though, just as with immigration.

Anyway Teesside Uni debunked the generations of unemployed thing years ago https://pure.hud.ac.uk/en/publications/benefit-street-and-the-myth-of-workless-communities/

What there IS, is insecure and temporary employment, which families cycle in and out of.

Teenage pregnancy rates have clearly dropped over the years. I was a teenage mum in 1993, the one girl who got pregnant in year 11. I’m now a higher rate tax payer and my DD got the highest GCSE grades in the school. DS got a 1st class degree from a top uni and works in the city financial district. My mum has been on benefits for over 30yrs, though both my parents worked when I was growing up, in manual jobs, factory etc. My mum didn’t actually want me to go to uni, and certainly didn’t want me to move to London for a job. It is hard to work for something with little support, but it’s possible, but you need a determined attitude.

I didn’t have an upbringing like you describe, but my parents didn’t show much interest in my education and had no aspirations for their dc to do well in life, which I find odd. For my mum I think it was linked to her wanting me to remain in the same small town she’s lived in over 70yrs, her world is small. That was the last thing I wanted.

It’s well documented sadly! If you look at places like Middlesbrough that have lost the ship building industry which was a huge employer, you we’ll see that there are families and it’s the third generation of some families that have never worked. The town has an unemployment rate of around 6.7% and approximately 1000 job vacancies, so it’s very clear as in most areas of depravation that people looking for jobs out number the vacancies. Going back to Middlesbrough there around 6 people for every vacancy!

The problem is many people are very one dimensional and only see one thing as a problem or cause, so posts like this get them all worked up. Poverty has an impact on outcomes, but so does parenting, expectations and the community experience you get raised in. You can take whatever lens you want to, be that ‘middle class families’, ‘the black community’, ‘The gypsy traveller community’ and find things that are good and also toxic tendencies that have an impact on children and development, and we should be allowed to talk about that. It is never in all cases, but it’s pattern recognition across groups of people. And people can belong to more than one of these groups or lenses so it’s more complicated and not ‘just’ putting people in boxes!!! I never understand why you cannot talk about this or in this way without people getting upset. If you have experience and see a pattern over a 30 year career of trying to help people… why would you get slated for that?! What is life and meaning if not direct human experience . People might have different interpretations but they have presumably had different experiences and seen different things. You’re clearly not wrong, and are saying something that 99% of people see but don’t feel like they can say.

It is not well documented at all. When researchers have looked for families with 3 generations unemployed they've been unable to come up with enough to form a useful cohort for statistical study.

As a former sw this is really the case unfortunately.

Ofcourse. And you also get to spend more times with your children. You are not to blame- the system is.

This is very bizarre, Middlesbrough falls under Teeside and has one of the highest unemployment rates in the UK! It’s well documented that places like here do actually have generations of families who have never worked! Middlesbrough was built on the steel and shipping building industries and once the closed it never recovered! My uncle was a ship builder there and was made redundant in the late 70’s and along with many of his colleagues never worked again, he would have been nearly 50 at the time!

You need slightly different qualifications being a brain surgeon or working as a care assistant.

Someone stopping working at 50 and not working again is not what OP was talking about. People being displaced by changing technology and not working again is well documented and happens over and over again (AI being the current version). But that's not the same as generations in the same family never working - which Teeside did debunk.

I work in a secondary school in Scotland, in an area of deprivation.
There are no consequences here for missing school or being late, as we don’t have fines. We have kids who routinely turn up halfway through the morning, if they turn up at all. Their parents don’t work. We MUST cut these people’s benefits, as their children are missing out on so much of their learning. And so the vicious cycle never ends.
Also, the sense of entitlement they have is unreal. Totally off the scale. With zero sense of personal responsibility that gets filtered down to the kids.
Roast me all you want, but work a day in my school before you do.

I grew up in poverty to generational fecklessness and the cycle continues with my brother. I however have taught since 2000. Here is my story in a nutshell:

1. My moments in care allowed me to see a different life and I hated being returned to the family home
2. I went to shit holes of schools but I was clever, thus stood out, and I was lucky to have teachers who guided me to college and then uni
3. Ironically, having feckless parents meant I have free tuition at uni and a bursary
4. Most importantly I wanted out. I worked since I was 15 but would give my parents board despite them having a council house and benefits. The injustice would make me seethe so I left at 18 and never returned.

You can educate but at the end of the day some people are happy 'getting by' and working cash in hand jobs. My brother and I had the same upbringing but he's living the life my parents did.

Exactly this

A friend of mine is a single mother of three. She works but the job she has is in the charity sector and doesn’t pay well.

There are endless things that she has to deal with. Stuff breaking that is hard to replace, there is never enough money through work. She’s exhausted with it.

She has enough ill health to claim PIP but doesn’t, that’d get her a functioning car. It’s only her determination that she doesn’t keeping her hanging on.

Really in widespread poverty in employment where is the incentive?

Wages haven’t risen since 2008 by much, costs have risen exponentially.

Its exhausting being poor, practically a full fine job trying to keep it all together.

There used to be good jobs for the uneducated, jobs that had pride attached to them. Because manufacturing, mining etc went and were replaced by the low paid shit to work for service sector, that pride has gone. Whole communities are left poverty struck.

I think our economy should be including those who are poor and left behind. There should be incentive to work. At the moment in certain jobs there is none.

There should be aspiration, pride and hope and there’s very little of that at the moment.

Quite how we do the above belongs to economists who actually give a shit about working class interests, if they could ever get influence politically.

@Summerhillsquare interesting but it’s a study of 20 families.

Education is not false hope. If dc can go to university, they should. The full loan for students is enough in cheaper cities and dc can try and work. They might even get a bursary. My DN did - an extra £2000 because my Dsis could not be bothered to work in her job. A fully qualified health professional. It’s definitely easy to get benefits and not bother to work.

The minimum wage cannot be much higher if we want businesses to actually employ people. Or maybe mass unemployment is the objective? Basic economics tells us there’s a limit on affordability.

No one makes anyone feel inferior. It’s definitely personal confidence that gets you through. When applying for a job, no one knows your background! It’s not disclosed. Once you have decided education and a good job are doable, many are capable of getting there. It’s one of the reasons why the middle class is so big. Lots of us are no longer working class. We’ve moved up through education and backing ourselves to do well. People who blame others enjoy that downtrodden victim persona.

We won’t change some people because they like what they are. They don’t want anything different and prefer to do nothing. They might find Reform, ego they will probably vote for, doesn’t agree.

Nanny state has resulted in a class of people who can't/won't do anything for themselves. These people wouldn't have survived in a society with no welfare state. I don't know the answer, but I'm fed up of my quality of life constantly reducing to pay for them.