're Will there always be poverty in the UK?

[mids2019]

This is my daughter's year 8 essay for RE and world views. I had a discssion with my daughter about the nature of poverty and it's definition and found we couldn't help but enter into political waters to fully develop an answer.

I think my daughter believed poverty didn't exist in the UK as a significant proportion of people own mobile phones and televisions. I explained that there will be differences in the definition of poverty and we certainly don't have the depths of poverty experienced by different countries but such views of UK poverty are espoused by right. wing populist politicians to warrant government policy.

Am I right in thinking my daughter should argue poverty will always persist and arguing there isn't poverty may mean she is marked down as it (a) isn't answering the question (b) lacks compassion (for RE).?

I am slightly annoyed that she should be answering a slightly loaded question actually as I feel you are breaching a little into personal politics with such a question.

Relative poverty and absolute poverty are helpful terms in this scenario.

There are large populations in relative poverty in the U.K.

She needs to Google Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
There are plenty of people in the UK who can't provide the first tier of needs for themselves or their family.
Objectively whatever country you're in, if you can't afford that you're in poverty.

If she is unaware such people exist in this country she should explore (virtually one way or another - documentaries, internet etc) beyond her immediate world experience and then she can come across the lived experience of people to whom she is currently obvlious and she can write her homework from an informed position.

You don't have to bring politics into it, so from that point of view YABU.
Jesus was very anti poverty and many religious lessons compassion and chastity make no sense unless you understand those who live it.
Maybe the teacher has a cohort like your daughter who are ignorant of swathes of society who exist and with whom she shares a community but doesn't realise it.

I wouldn't be annoyed I'd be glad my child's education was doing its job of expanding her awareness and horizons. How can our future exercise critical thinking if they don't expand their knowledge on what's out there

This is a very standard RE topic.

Don't answer it from a (party) political viewpoint.

Is she being expected to compare the approach of various religions? The topic will be relevant to what they have done in class recently.

Jesus said - the poor will always be with you (mark 14:7) so the essay title is a rewrite of a quote from the bible.

I agree with a previous poster - absolute poverty (not enough food to eat, danger of starvation etc) and relative poverty (can't afford to keep up with the Joneses) are useful concepts here.

She can write whatever she wants, as long as her points of view are clear,factual and well researched. Debating on the no poverty side is a lot harder though as data and research go against it "There's no poverty because mobile phones" is not a good argument.

If she can improve on that , draw some comparisons , research poverty and relative poverty and explain why poverty isn't a thing in the UK, she can do a good essay that won't get marked down for subjective reasons like "compassion ". However, it will be difficult and it will be a lot harder. Up to her if she is up to challenge and wants to invest her time and efforts to argue that side.

I'm rather surprised that an y8 doesn't know poverty exists and has such reductive ideas about it. Did you not talk about it at home?

She will have studied this topic in class and been given advice on answering it. It won't have just been "here's an essay"and expecting a Year 8 to go and answer it themselves.

I'm rather surprised that an y8 doesn't know poverty exists and has such reductive ideas about it. Did you not talk about it at home?

Many young people don’t understand poverty - hence the need for education. Her naivety that having a mobile phone precludes poverty is very telling. Many think it means slums or homelessness rather than inadequate housing, inability to access available healthcare, hunger due to inadequate food, insufficient heating, poor clothing, etc. all of this within a family that loves and cares for you.

I would suspect that many of children and young people who live in poverty in the U.K. don’t know that they actually live in poverty.

Thanks for all the brilliant responses .

We live in a town where there is a lot of 'benefit bashing ' and hence maybe that has influenced her view in poverty?

She also very annoyingly said that 'people are poor because that are lazy'. I am trying to get to the bottom of how she came to this viewpoint (what influences? Tik tok?) so we had to have a conversation about those this is not the case so at least it has brought out some interesting discussion .....

Actually I would argue that we do have the depths of poverty you see in other countries. we have street homeless, I don’t know how much poorer they would have to be to be comparable with the poorest in the world. also, poverty in the UK even reaches middle class people. the fact that Ukrainians return to a war zone for medical and dental treatment they can't get in the UK speaks volumes.

With regard to 'with there always be poverty' we will always
have a poorest 10%. no reason why all their basic needs for housing, heating,
food, healthcare etc should be unmet though.

As for 'poor people being lazy' I know both rich people and poor people and guess who works a lot harder? Clue, it’s not the rich. There’s a saying, If wealth was divided up according to hard work, the African women would be the richest in the world.

Totally standard RE question - she needs to explain relative compared to absolute poverty.
Does she need to look at religious responses such as Zakat in Islam or organisations such as the Trussel trust and church food banks ?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zdrxbdm/revision/9

I agree with this.
I grew up in real poverty in the UK, poor quality unheated home, cheapest food, even my school was bad (as often the case in poor areas) but didn't know I was poor. Poor was what we saw on TV, it was African villages, famine and Band Aid.

I wish the terms relative poverty and absolute poverty were not so similar, and especially that they were not both shortened to poverty.

Absolute poverty does not exist in UK (except for maybe very small numbers who have slipped through all the safety nets).

Relative poverty - which can mean getting stuck in substandard housing or not getting basic needs met in some other way - does exist.

The definition of relative poverty is such that poverty would be found everywhere, unless all variation in income and most forms of private property were scrapped. So yes you can say that poverty will always exist. Just as you can say that absolute poverty already does not.

And perhaps turn the question towards how to improve life for those in relative poverty here, whilst also maintaining and targeting an aid budget to work to limit the effects of absolute poverty everywhere.

There's also an interesting possible digression into overconsumption by the West, which stokes both kinds of poverty, not least through climate change which has greatest effects on communities that have the least

She should answer with whatever she believes. Its quite an open ended question and I don't think there's necessarily a right or wrong answer.

She could talk about relative poverty and the attendant problems of social exclusion.

Or she could point out that absolute poverty in the UK is thankfully rare.

Both would be correct.

She would probably get the best marks by saying both things in the body of the text and and then picking one side of the other for the conclusion.

How do you define absolute poverty and is 13% a very small number? Leeds Observatory – Leeds Poverty Fact Book – Section 1: Relative and Absolute Poverty

I think there is an important point about making children aware of poverty when they may not necessarily encounter it every day.

I tried to give an illustration my daughter would understand, that of FSM, and I think it was enlightening for her to realise that there were reasons dome children did not pay for meals. I hope though that this sort of discussion does not stigmatise poverty.

The problem with acceptance of poverty with 13 year olds is that poverty brings on connotations of the absolute poor in Africa etc. and it is a nuanced discussion about what poverty means in the UK and how and if it can be solved.

Personally I think this is a big question and can be answered on a number of levels.

@Kendodd
absolutely agree with you take on the 'poor being lazy' but it shows how such tropes can be picked up by children in their early teens especially when you have a lot of families that may agree with such views (incorrectly).

the problem of defining poverty is a really interesting one and I wonder if we can purely rely on quantitative measures especially a rudimentary income defintion?

for instance almost every undergraduate student is in poverty using some of the metrics suggested by this study? If you take on a student loan and maintenance loan to go to Oxford and you don't have a summer job does that necessarily make you 'poor' especially if your parents have reasonable incomes?

it seems poverty does have have aspects that aren't purely financial but relate to access to basic health provision, education etc. and there are conflating issues such a s mental health problems which could lead to very poor financial decision making. An e place would be a gambling addict who may get a reasonable income but the addiction in essence would make him 'poor' as regard remaining income after feeding the addiction.

Using a purely financial metric like 60% of the median income (~£18k pa) draws a lot of people such as the store mentioned students, pensioners, young single people possibly pursuing careers in the arts, part time workers etc. Into the umbrella of poor. (It also does not take into account wealth only income.)

One thing I did discuss with my daughter is how important children are in general poverty. I would expect a significant portion of those in poverty are single parents where one parent does not contribute at all in a financial sense and the inability for example a young single mother to juggle well paid work (relatively) with child care can lead to poverty traps.

@medicine

really good points and I think this is challenging subject for a 13 year old.

you could argue with an NHS, social housing, free education, utility bill aid etc. then by some definitions absolute poverty is very rare and could be educated by better housing regulation and ensuring basic health and utility bills were met.

I think part of the question is how we define absolute and relative poverty and is there a definitive non arbitrary method? If we have a spread of wealth in society does this necessarily mean a high level of poverty? Is the term 'poverty' being used as a provocative term by those by political bent wish to reduce wealth inequality?

it is such a nuanced question in reality.....

One thing I am advising my daughter in is to avoid some really quite viscous stereotyping that seems to occur in her school and if nothing else can look at a question like this in a mature fashion.

The problem with exams is that they are not about providing the correct answer, but only the answer in the marking scheme. If you want to get a good grade, you need to study the marking scheme to identify the answers they want to hear - even if this means telling them that the sky green.