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.

Unless you have trichotillomania you weren’t pulling your hair out and to say you were is actually really out of order.

😂
That’s all you took from this debate?

The main problem with that is that I assumes those people will diligently work for no pay… Many might turn up to avoid their benefits being stopped but would do the absolute bear minimum and take the piss whenever they could. For it to work, it would need to have teeth.

Either you do community work for your benefits, and if unless you perform, those benefits are removed - they get nothing. Ultimately if people refuse to work, they should be made to live in a camp until they do (ie very basic barracks with some gruel once per day). All they have to do to avoid that is to show willing and put in a half-decent day’s work.

It’s quite simple.

1. Provide the same number of jobs as in the past. Bring back the factories or the industry that can actually employ the millions here who need work

2. Make that work pay for a life as it did in the past.

Otherwise all that’s going on is a bunch of well off people asking a larger bunch of poor people, who don’t own anything more than the clothes they stand up in, to become serfs and keep quiet about it please. And the answer is no, and it will become a lot less polite the more it is pushed.

@WaryCrow Who will buy what the factories produce? Would you like the mines opened up? Who is paying? Everyone else for this nonsensical work scheme. Get educated and get out as generations used to do!

Rowntree looked for “three generations where no one has ever worked” and looked in two cities.

That’s different and much more extreme than OP’s claim.

Are you saying what OP describes “doesn’t exist” anywhere either?

My family were poor and when my dad was made redundant we did have to live off benefits for a while. But my mum was ambitious for me. Expected I would go to uni, stable routine, home cooked food. A loving grandparent in my life who supported us. You can't undo parents who don't care.

There’s absolutely no way you’re a qualified social worker - your posts are dripping with condescension, if you were a social worker you’d understand the multi-faceted nature of generational disadvantage and disenfranchised people.

I'll get flamed for saying this.

I genuinely think there's a sizeable proportion of any human population who are less academically inclined, who have poorer executive function, for whom the current job environment just isn't suitable. In the past these people could work as manual labourers or the like, working close to or in and around the home, in jobs that were highly repetitive and not overly complex. Even "skilled" work like weaving or smithing was repetitive - you trained as a youngster then did the same thing for the rest of your life. factory at the end of the road with a knocker up waking you. Living on the employers land/in tied housing, with rent deducted from pay. In the pre industrial era there were no "bills" to be organised about and people would have been paid daily or weekly which can be easier to manage. There were stronger social structures in place that helped people manage.

Nowadays everything is fast paced, employers demand speed & productivity from every single role, repetitive/routine work has been automated. Its too much for a lot of people to cope with alongside the complexities of modern finances, juggling childcare, lack of community support.

If we take all the work these people could manage away, we can't then complain if there isn't any work left that they can manage.

this will be controversial, but why are we leaving children in the care of people who care so little about them that they don’t get them to school and give them red bull for breakfast and smoke in front of them?

I agree with this, unfortunately your cognitive ability is the highest predictor of your outcomes. To be really brutal we shouldn’t be helping people to have more children than they can manage. Kids from less than ideal backgrounds who are reasonably well adjusted ten to find something to do with themselves.

Then things will carry on as they are won’t they?

You can’t just keep on telling people to ‘get educated and get out’ when education costs a fortune, ‘getting out’ costs another, and THESE PEOPLE DONT HAVE IT. Plus where are they to go? Everywhere is full.

The things factories - or for that matter home crafts - produce are what is needed for daily life. Everything you take for granted shipping from other serfs elsewhere. Food, cloth, energy.

It isn’t great and is too early. I know a German academic who got put into technical college because he had dyslexia, for example. He’s now a Classics professor so it worked out for him in the end but it’s deeply flawed to sort children into boxes at such a young age.

I actually don’t agree with children specialising at 16 all together. I think it’s utterly ridiculous we force them to choose their entire future at this age. We should adopt the liberal arts method as in the US or better still, encourage more people to work and live for a few years before uni as they do in Sweden.

Read David Willets book on HE if interested. I also recommend Nick Gibbs new book on the curriculum reforms, if anyone is interested in the education system in this country that is. I’m not a Tory and they did lots of horrendous things, I don’t agree with all of their education reforms by any stretch but it’s impossible to say they haven’t improved the behaviour in schools. I said earlier in the thread but I went to school in the Blair era and I saw it first hand- it was Lord of the Flies.

University costs now, and the gains are not worth it. Especially not for women.

Well this is bollocks frankly. It’s just a graduate tax, you barely notice it leaving your account. I grew up poor and now I’m not thanks to my university education.

Because the alternative is some method of state surveillance and if you’re caught doing either of these things, your child is removed and placed into the care system. It doesn’t make sense does it? A lot of it goes on behind closed doors anyway. Nobody knew about the addiction and DV in my home growing up. I was clean, fed, went to school, was punctual etc so no markers of neglect.

Part of the problem is employers requiring people to have qualifications for low skilled jobs. So we've got this bizarre situation of academic graduates frustrated in low skill jobs and people who would be more suited to these jobs not able to get their foot in the door. Add in generational trauma and mental health issues its no wonder they just give up and accept a low achieving life on benefits.

I this your experience Burnout? Did you like working? Do you want your children to have the opportunity to work in fulfilling jobs?

Bring back the factories or the industry that can actually employ the millions here who need work

Who is going to pay for these factories?
What will they be making?
Who is going to buy what they make?

Why should pensioners get their gardens done for free?

They already benefit from the triple lock and now they would sit with a cup of tea and watch someone do their garden for free? Ridiculous.

We have one awful family in our estate. Older lads been in prison for drugs and guns. The older girl used to be drunk on the school run.

Pulling apart the whole family and removing the children would be a collosal task. I always wonder if maybe the younger kids should be fostered and at weekly boarding school. At least give them a great education and give them a chance of a fresh start. Is boarding school with support cheaper than endless social services support? Money would fix it but there won't be enough of it.

I agree. There are countless families I deal with where no one works.

This research: "Interviewed 20 families with long-term worklessness across two generations. The 'older generation' members of these families were usually too ill to participate, or deceased."

A sample of 20 is usually (in research terms) considered too low to draw any conclusions from, and it's very telling that they couldn't actually look at three generations. Further, their findings were that there wasn't a 'culture' of worklessness, however, it was true that generations were workless. They say:

Rarely were there simple, single explanations for why individuals in the middle generation had such extensive records of worklessness. Characteristically, a range of serious problems associated with social exclusion and poverty combined over time to keep them out of the labour market. As one interviewee asked, "how can you work when you have a life like mine?"

In other words, if you're going to interpret research, you really do have to read it and understand what it says.

Nonsense. UC never pays more not to work.

Because the alternative is care and the outcome of DC in the care system is poor. It's a reason why the threshold to remove DC is so high.