A very warm welcome to this second oral evidence session on delivering the child poverty strategy, a joint inquiry between the Work and Pensions Select Committee and the Education Select Committee. We are delighted to welcome our first panel. We have Dr Matt Barnes from the University of London; Baroness Ruth Lister, who is one of our colleagues here but also an emeritus professor at Loughborough University; Ed McPherson from WPI Economics; and Professor Ruth Patrick from the University of Glasgow. I need to declare some interests, as I know other Members do. As well as knowing our esteemed colleague from the House of Lords, Ruth Lister, I am an acquaintance of Professor Ruth Patrick. I also need to say that Alun Francis on panel two is a former colleague from Oldham. Does anybody else want to declare an interest?

I am the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on social mobility, for which the Sutton Trust is the secretariat.

The Government’s strategy for child poverty, when it was published last year, was very ambitious in what it set out about reducing child poverty. Their own models estimate that 500,000 children will be lifted out of poverty, but at the same time by 2030 the Government estimate that there will still be 30% of children living in poverty. What are the measures you think we need to take to strengthen this, shift the dial around child poverty and make a real impact in driving it down? Who would like to kick off with that big question?

I will say something to start. Thanks very much for inviting me to give evidence. The first thing to emphasise is that the ambition is contained within the commitment, which has now been realised, to remove the two-child limit, and that is one that the academic evidence definitely supported. All the evidence supported the fact that that is essential to driving child poverty down. A particularly significant thing about getting rid of the two-child limit is that while it was in place, it was eroding the link between need and entitlement within our social security system—the idea that the assessment and the decision about what somebody is entitled to are linked to what they need. It is really good that the two-child limit has gone, but I think we still have policies in place in our social security system that erode that link. The one I know most about, which I think urgently needs to go, is the benefit cap. One frustration that others giving evidence may share is that during the time that we were seeing the debate about the two-child limit, people were often talking about it as a two-child benefit cap. That eroded understanding of the fact that they are two separate policies: there is the two-child limit, which restricts entitlement to the first two children, or did historically, and then there is a benefit cap. The thing about the benefit cap is that it places a completely arbitrary limit on the amount that a household can receive, irrespective of need. The research I have done with colleagues at the London School of Economics, Dr Kitty Stewart and Aaron Reeves, investigating the impact of both policies, showed us how the benefit cap pushes families far below the poverty line. It has a massively detrimental impact and the families it affects are some of the most vulnerable in society. Getting rid of the benefit cap is a real priority. The only other thing I will say is that there is a broader need. We need to see investment in social security in the round, so it is important that the two-child limit is positioned as a first step, but it is the beginning of a longer journey.

I agree with everything Dr Patrick has said. I do not think I was the only person who cried tears of joy when we heard that the two-child limit was being abolished. I agree with Dr Patrick that the benefit cap needs to go, particularly from the perspective of deep poverty, but I know the Government have set their face against this, so at the very least the threshold for the cap should be uprated annually in line with the universal credit standard allowance. I would also argue, as did some of my colleagues now on the Front Bench at the time when the legislation was going through, that child benefit should not be included in the benefit cap. If we are comparing incomes in and out of work, the working family is getting child benefit, so it is not an equal playing field. I would also argue that the other immediate priority is local housing allowance, which has been frozen yet again. The evidence suggests, and the child poverty strategy itself makes the point, that increasingly housing costs are a driver of poverty, particularly in the private rented sector. That needs to be uprated annually. In the longer term, like Dr Patrick, I think there needs to be more investment in social security. I would like to see an independent review of the adequacy of social security benefits. I very much welcome the real level of universal credit standard allowance being increased, but the Government themselves accept that it is being done so only modestly. I draw the Committee’s attention to an article that I think came out online this week from the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice, which suggests that long-term investment in redistribution of social security has an impact on long-term child poverty. It is not just a quick fix; it has that long-term effect.

I agree with what the others have said. I think a strategy that focuses on the key drivers of poverty—income from work, income from social security, cost of essentials—is incredibly important and useful. We have a particular interest in researching those in deep and complex poverty. We will probably talk a bit more about that later, but focusing on the families that suffer from very low financial resources and have multiple drivers of poverty, particularly those that have lasted for years in a persistent cycle of disadvantage, is particularly important.

I might quickly introduce myself and why I am here. I am representing WPI Economics. We provided the secretariat for the Social Metrics Commission, a commission led by Baroness Stroud to work on a new measure of poverty and work through issues related to poverty measurement. We also provided the modelling and the secretariat for the Poverty Strategy Commission, a commission led by Baroness Stroud to look at poverty alleviation in the UK and try to build political consensus around it. I agree that the removal of the two-child limit is a good thing. It breaks the link between need and provision. It is also, not just from a moral standpoint, very efficient. If you look at the amount of money that you need to spend to move children out of poverty, removing the two-child limit is one of the most cost-effective ways of reducing child poverty. The two-child limit is a very effective way of leaving children in poverty, almost bizarrely so. The other two things—local housing allowance and the benefit cap—are compelling, because there is a clear argument around unfairness. It breaks the link between need and provision. A measure that does not necessarily address the fairness argument as cleanly, and this feels obvious, is just raising the amount of money that you give to children through universal credit. We have seen the Scottish child payment. That has demonstrably reduced child poverty rates in Scotland. When you model an extension of that to the UK, it is very effective as well. It feels too obvious to say, but just putting money into that aspect of the universal credit system is a very effective way of targeting child poverty if you have a significant amount of money to throw into a social security measure.

Can I ask a quick question and get a quick response? Some academics have said that there needs to be greater co-ordination between Government Departments around child poverty. They refer to, for example, the health inequalities strategy, which made a massive difference around reducing infant mortality through reducing child poverty. What are your views? If you do not have any, that is fine.

I think one of the great strengths of the way the strategy has been developed is that it is cross-Government and recognises the responsibility of all Departments. We will talk later about the Home Office, which does not seem to see its responsibility in quite the same way. I was very struck by the written evidence that the Departments gave you, in which they said, “Government is also committed to maintain a core central child poverty team with cross-government oversight by Ministers.” That is not what I had understood. If that is the case, that is excellent, but my fear, and I think the fear of many people, is that by simply putting it in DWP, which is very important, you could lose sight of that. I thought a rather good model was provided by the social cohesion strategy, which proposes a new ministerial steering group with regular reporting to the Prime Minister. I think that is crucial and, given that it is the Government’s moral mission, that might help to maintain that cross-Government approach.

Does anybody want to add anything, very briefly?

Very quickly, I agree that it is super important to have that cross-governmental approach and that ministerial commitment, leadership and accountability. I would argue that that should be at Secretary of State level. I will give a live example. At the moment, we are having too many policy debates in silos. If we look at poverty and SEND, children with additional needs, and then economic inactivity and need, too often those issues are not being joined up. The DWP is very concerned about high level of need and the DFE is highly concerned about how it reforms provision for SEND. We need to have that cross-governmental approach, and it is exactly the same with child poverty because we know the harm that that does to education.

I think health comes in there somewhere. Thank you very much; I will hand over now to Jo Baxter.

Thank you very much for joining us this morning. To what extent do you think the employment-related policies outlined in the strategy will help to reduce child poverty? Are the changes that the Government are pursuing the right ones to support parents?

One of the key things that we must get right when we are talking about child poverty is being clear about the role that employment can play with effective action to get child poverty down. For many years, we have heard this buzz-phrase that work is the best route out of poverty, and that buzz-phrase just collides with the evidence. There is, as we all know, a very high rate of in-work poverty. Again, working with Kitty Stewart and Aaron Reeves in about October of last year, we did a piece of analysis that was asking what can be achieved on child poverty with employment alone. Our conclusion was that you cannot get very far. Even with the very ambitious employment targets of 80%, and if we were to assume that they applied to parents and second earners, we would only lift about 100,000 children out of poverty. It was not sufficient, and there are a lot of reasons for that. Because of length, I cannot go into them all now, unless you want them, but one of the key reasons is that it is social security that we need. The role of social security has always been, or should be, to adapt for periods over a life course where our needs are higher. Those of us with young children or children in their teens know that in those periods household expenditure is higher, and wage cannot do that alone. If we look at the trend line—the trajectory—of poverty over time, we see that writ large on the evidence base. When social security support is reduced, child poverty rates go up. When it is increased, child poverty rates go down. It is a very interesting policy sphere, in a way, because we know very clearly what the fixes are, but it is about having the commitment to make them.

I agree. Employment is important for a host of reasons, but it is not the primary lead. I have been very struck by the analysis that Professor Patrick contributed to. The article I mentioned earlier about long-term poverty found that policies on employment were less effective than policies on social security in addressing long-term child poverty. There are clearly important things to be done, and it is very much about reducing the barriers to employment, particularly for mothers. Those barriers go very wide. Transport is an example of how a cross-Government approach is so necessary. In rural areas, public transport can be crucial to being able to find work. I do not think the strategy talks about one other possible lever, which is a second earner work allowance in universal credit. Total worklessness is not the issue it used to be, but if you want to get more people on universal credit into paid work in two-parent families, you have to think about the second earner. It is very difficult for a second earner at present, so I will throw that into the pot.

I think it is clear that large-scale unemployment is not the driver of child poverty now that it was when child poverty was high in the 1990s, for example. A lot of people who have children in poverty are in work. It might be part-time work; the conditions might be quite bad. Measures to improve the stability of their work—guaranteed hours and improved employment rights—are good and will improve their experience of poverty, but they will not necessarily show up in poverty metrics, just as a consequence of how poverty is measured. If you have two families in an income survey, with one person who has wildly erratic hours and an employer who messes them around and tells them that their hours are cancelled when they are halfway to work, versus another person who earns the same amount with a considerate employer who respects their time, ultimately they will have the same weekly earnings, so they are going to be in the same place relative to the poverty line. Measures to improve people’s experience through improving the solidity of their work do not necessarily show up in poverty measures. That is just a consequence of the way that we have to measure poverty—the armoury that we have to measure the problem. If you want to look at how far those policies will reduce poverty in the long run, you need to assess those policies individually, look at the mechanisms by which you think improving people’s security in employment might lead them to take on more hours or to take on training or whatever else, and then try to assess those channels specifically. By making those changes you are not going to see a large swing in the top-level child poverty numbers, not because they are not good policies, but because of the way child poverty is measured.

I should also mention childcare, which is crucial to enabling people to access paid work. Childcare should be seen as something important for children in its own right; it should not simply be tied to employment in the way it is at present.

I repeat what the others have said. For a working family in poverty, it is that combination of low pay, low hours and insecure work, but also how that interacts with other problems that families have—childcare constraints, disability, health caring, insecure housing, housing costs. They are important in their own right, but should be understood as part of a wider package of policies.

We have to think about the role of the inadequacy of social security in making it harder to move into good work. An example is the benefit cap. Some early analysis we did showed that it was pushing people further away from the labour market. If you imagine the extent and the experience of destitution—we know that from the qualitative evidence base as well—that can push people further away from the labour market, so we must recognise that giving people an adequate bedrock, giving people a sense of the ideas of security that Ed McPherson was talking about, can be achieved through the labour market but can also be achieved through the social security system. Its absence can also make progression and entry into work harder to achieve.

Ed, you have stated that it is difficult to make an estimate of the impact of employment-related policies on the number of children in child poverty. However, is there an estimate out there? What is the scale of the issue of children who are in poverty and impacted by employment-related policies?

I think it would be difficult to measure. Certainly, we have not necessarily attempted it recently. The strategy avoids estimating it for quite a good reason, in that it does not necessarily always show up cleanly in child poverty impacts. I do think that if you want to know the extent to which employment measures are going to reduce child poverty, and this is an unhelpful answer, what you would have to do is be quite clear about saying, “These are the channels that we think are going to be in play. We think that if you improve people’s stability in employment, this reduces their cognitive load, which means that they are more able to go and do other things. They are more able to go into training and education; they are more able to request more work and to get more hours; they are more able to progress into higher-paid work. They can be more proactive and more on the front foot, because they are not in a defensive position about their employment rights.” You would need to articulate what those channels are and then do some proper economic evaluation work on whether those channels are in play and whether those changes are measurable. I think you would try to get at a poverty estimate that way from the mechanism. It is difficult to get at it using microdata, using the FRS and HBAI—the family resources survey and households below average income—which is the standard approach, because a lot of the changes will not have immediate impacts. If you look at a family in the 2029 FRS, and they are in a reasonably good job with stability of employment and are just above the poverty line, there is no way of knowing that they are in that position indirectly because of an employment rights reform that was made several years previously. It is just impossible to untangle that, because of how complicated all these issues are. Policy-level evaluations informed by an economic model of what you are trying to achieve would be the best way of teasing out the child poverty impacts of the Government’s various employment programmes and changes to employment law.

Can I quickly come back to that 100,000 figure? I think that if we look at the totality of the measures that are being proposed in the strategy and the broader objectives around moving towards full employment, even if all that were to be successful, the modelling suggests that the total impact would only be to lift 100,000 children out of poverty. If we make the contrast with the impact that the two-child limit removal will have, we can already see the relative role being played by social security versus employment. On the evidence base, it is worth saying that because of all the work that was done, especially in the new Labour years, to try to support more and more families into employment, and the moves we have seen over time from a single adult worker to a two-worker family model norm, what we describe in our analysis with LSE is that the low-hanging fruit on employment has already been harvested. If we look at the figures on who is currently out of work and who the workless families are, they are families that often face very profound barriers to work. Nearly nine in 10 of the remaining workless families face at least one significant barrier to work. Half have a child under five, half have an adult with a disability or long-standing health condition, and nearly three in 10 have a child with a disability, so we all know that those are quite substantial barriers to work. When we have looked at the potential cost of effective employment support—it is a figure that was based on some analysis—it could cost up to £15 billion in additional employment support to get people with those substantial barriers into employment. I agree with Baroness Lister that employment is useful and important for a lot of reasons, but we must be clear about the role it can play in tackling child poverty specifically.

It is often assumed that raising the minimum wage is an important tool. It is important in its own right, but it is a very blunt tool when it comes to tackling child poverty.

I am going to focus now on how we measure poverty. We have the newly developed deep poverty metric. I would like to ask each of the panel what you make of that, looking at the positive side but also the risks that come with it.

I think it is important. It improves on the measure that focuses purely on income. The 60% median measure is very important, of course—it has been around for ages and is useful for trends and for comparative reasons—but the deep material poverty metric is much more about the lived experience of poverty, and it tells you much more about affordability. Poverty is not just about your income. There are other costs related to it—debts, disability-related expenses, those wider financial pressures—that the material poverty measure picks up and the low-income measure, as it stands, does not, although the Social Metrics Commission measure, which I am sure we will hear more about, goes some way to capturing those financial struggles. A couple of things that it does not do are around complexity of poverty. We are very interested in the idea that certain types of poverty can differ from each other and that people in poverty can have a number of drivers, but that is not uncovered by that measure. It also does not measure persistence. Poverty is very much about low financial resources, complex backgrounds—in other words, families with multiple drivers—and it is about persistence as well, which is a static measure. The other challenge with that measure is how it overlaps with the low-income measures. When you look at families in poverty you see the minority that are on a low income that are also in material deprivation. There are lots of reasons why that is, but it can sometimes be quite confusing to communicate those statistics. Again, I think the SMC measure that gets at financial resources in a different way and brings in some of these challenges overlaps better with the deprivation measure. For understanding poverty, which is a difficult concept to measure, there is an advantage where the measures are talking a bit more to each other.

I think the deep material poverty measure is a big potential issue. It is difficult to operationalise. You cannot really forecast it. You can look at what likely changes in income might be, but there is no way of knowing how people are going to choose to spend that money. It is difficult to forecast how much more expensive energy might get and the various things that are considered essentials. Where I think it is useful is as something of a sanity check next to the relative poverty measure, because 60% of median income relative poverty is useful in a lot of ways. There is a long time series for it and it is internationally comparable, because most European countries keep a time series of relative poverty on that measure, but there are issues with it. One of the issues is that just looking at income, net of taxes and benefits and net of housing spend, does not always tell you how dire somebody’s immediate financial situation might be. There might be costs related to disability; there might be costs related to childcare; they may or may not have other assets that they can use to try to support their consumption. That means that it does not necessarily line up with things like deprivation and food bank usage. The SMC tries to correct for some of those things by adding and deducting more things to account for the resources that a family might have. The other thing that relative poverty measures sometimes do is go down even if there is not a real improvement in people’s lived position. Imagine that there was a large inflationary spike caused by an increase in the price of petrol, hypothetically, and that incomes in the middle of the income distribution fell behind inflation by a couple of percentage points and there were a slight real terms erosion in median income. People’s income at the low end of the spectrum might keep up with inflation, because a lot more of their income is indexed and they are on benefits, on the state pension or on minimum wage, which is uprated every year, whereas incomes in the middle of the distribution might fall behind inflation. We would end up with a fall in median income, a fall in the poverty line and therefore a reduction in the number of people who are in relative poverty. What you would not want to do is declare victory and say that relative poverty has fallen. That is where something like deep material poverty is useful because it shows you that the position of families at the bottom end of the income distribution has not improved, but the change that you see is a result of macroeconomic circumstances. That is why the human poverty index reports absolute poverty alongside relative poverty: to avoid that statistical artifice. Deep material poverty is a useful sanity check to report alongside the headline measure, to cut through when the headline measure might misbehave, if that makes any sense.

Having written a book on the concept of poverty, I am absolutely clear that no measure of poverty is perfect. It tries to measure something that is not totally measurable. The 60% of median income is the best we have, for the reasons already given. It is useful to add a material deprivation measure to that, but personally I think it would be a good idea to have a very low income measure alongside that. I do not know what percentage of median income it might be—maybe 40% or 50% of median income, because that would allow you to make a direct comparison between what is happening with poverty generally and what is happening with deep poverty. Comparing material deprivation figures with income figures is like comparing apples and pears. Now that the DWP has improved its measure of poverty to include administrative data on benefit receipt, that might address one of the arguments that has been made against using the very low income measure, which is that the data make it very difficult to be sure that you have it right. I think it might be easier to do that now.

We are getting a little bit behind, so can we be concise with our responses? Over to you, Darren Paffey.

My question is specifically to Dr Barnes. In your evidence, you say that the Government should pay explicit attention to those who are experiencing deep and complex poverty. Can you elaborate a bit more on how you define deep and complex poverty, as opposed to different definitions of poverty? What in practice does that mean for our ability to track the progress of the child poverty strategy?

The centre that I work at has a particular interest in deep and complex poverty. As I say, we are working to operationalise it at the moment, but it is very much about families that have very low financial resources. Sitting alongside that, which I think is the case for many families in that situation but perhaps is not visualised in the statistics, is having multiple interacting drivers of poverty. Here we are talking about the things we talked about with employment: people being either out of work or low-paid and with low hours of work, and on top of that having health or disability problems, high housing costs, debt or caring responsibilities, particularly where those situations have happened persistently for those families over a number of years. That deep and complex poverty gets to a particular type of poverty that is probably going to affect the families with the lowest financial resources persistently, so having some measure that can identify and track those would help us to understand whether the strategy and policies around those families are working. Those things are possible to measure in the data that we have. In the HBAI report that comes out every year there are a lot of statistics sometimes hidden away in Excel spreadsheets and things like that, but which show particular characteristics of people in poverty. Some of these drivers are captured in those statistics, but what you do not get is poverty rates for families that have combinations of those factors. We did some analysis a few years ago now, which needs updating, that showed, as we all understand, that people in poverty do not have the same circumstances. We created typologies that identified different types of poverty that would situate people with different levels of financial resources, but also with different combinations of drivers. It was very useful to create those typologies and track how those families are doing, in terms of their financial resources and how policies help particular typologies of poverty.

You mentioned that there are drivers that the deep material poverty measures do not necessarily capture. You may already have had the chance to highlight what those drivers are, but would you bring them to our attention again? Is there anything that we should be looking at that is not necessarily covered?

I think the measures of poverty that exist at the moment—the low income one, the deep material poverty measures—are identifying you as being in poverty. That is what the measures of poverty are. The drivers are the things that can impact or cause those circumstances. A lot of them are mentioned in the strategy, and it focuses on the things that we have been talking about. I think what we are missing a bit is identifying families that have multiples of those and making that really clear. You can imagine that it is the families that have multiple complex drivers that are the hardest to tackle, that are going to be in poverty more persistently and that often need more joined-up policy solutions. Again, there is a whole range of typologies there, and identifying those is important to see which ones are getting helped and which ones are not. It will help with policy design as well.

This question is for Ed McPherson in particular. Getting a definition of child poverty that is accurate and meaningful is a crucial first step, because in the end Government interventions will be designed to answer those issues. The Social Metrics Commission was formed to try to build a common consensus on that definition. How far down the road do you think they are with getting everyone to agree?

There was a fair bit of disagreement during the course of the Social Metrics Commission. I think by the end of it there was a fair amount of agreement on the compromise measure and the various principles that we were trying to incorporate. I would say that the political landscape in the UK and internationally has changed quite materially since 2017-18; I do not know whether the same level of consensus holds at this point. Largely, it is a case of the political right not being convinced of the value of relative poverty measures. That is largely what people mean when they refer to political consensus on the issue, because there are various different statistical and conceptual difficulties with relative poverty. I just think it is difficult to know what the political right will look like in Europe in two or three years’ time, so it is difficult to say how far there is consensus around a lot of those issues. In a lot of ways, it is an issue of prioritisation and whether it would be a priority. Whether measuring this properly would be a priority, given constrained resources, I do not know. It is not as optimistic an answer as I would have given a couple of years ago necessarily.

Thank you very much for your honesty. Peter is going to carry on.

As the MP for an area with very high living costs—the costs of renting in Bracknell are as high as in many places in London, for example—I think a lot about how challenging it can be to identify what poverty means in a particular location, because it does differ. It also differs for different groups because of the costs that certain groups face and others do not. How do you think our understanding of those complexities has evolved over time?

I can only really speak about the work that we have done on SMC and the work that the Government have done on below-average resources, which is their version of the SMC metric. It is incorporating things like housing costs in full, looking at mortgage costs as well as rental costs, looking at childcare costs in full, looking at the costs of disability in full, which we attempt to do by deducting extra costs of disability benefits and effectively saying that if the Government have said that this is a payment that you need to meet your costs, it should not really be considered in income. We should assume that that is a cost on the other side of the ledger, the reason you are receiving that payment. It is crude, and there is work to be done on all that. There is work to be done on including debt, which at the moment the survey does not allow you to do properly. What you do start to see when you include a lot of those things is that the profile of poverty gets younger and more complicated. A lot more young adults are in poverty, more children are in poverty, and a lot more disabled people are in poverty. I guess that is a necessary corollary of the different costs that you are including in the measure, but it does shift the population of people who are in poverty younger, into more complex needs, into more disabled groups and groups that have higher housing costs, which maybe is not surprising. One thing worth noting is that the group of people you are looking at is very sensitive to the measure that you are using. The group of people who are in deep material poverty is very different from the group of people who are in relative poverty at 60% of median income. There is a lot of work making the case in the strategy, but it is being really clear about the group of people we are identifying as being in poverty and about what their needs are and what can be done to help them. In a way, you are choosing a group of people to target. That is not a decision that should be taken lightly. Development work in this area is important and will pay off in improved understanding of the problem.

Could I come in with one follow-up about that? In your question there is something implicit about whose understanding of poverty we mean. It is interesting to think about how many people who are themselves in poverty and facing child poverty may not themselves identify as being in poverty. We have not touched on it yet, and we may not get a chance because of time, but in the work that I do with Changing Realities, I lead a coalition of over 200 parents and carers who are on a low income, so they are experiencing child poverty. It is about them documenting their everyday lives and pushing for change, but many of them, for reasons of pride—things that Baroness Lister has written about, like the stigma that comes with being in poverty—would not self-describe as being in poverty. There is something very important there about the public and political will for action on poverty. It rests with the political leaders and the narrative and the stories that we tell, but there is a very important disconnect. When we think about the child poverty strategy and when we hear stuff in the media about wanting to see a reduction in child poverty, many of the parents who might well benefit and be targeted by that might think, “That is meant for somebody else, not for me.” There is a broader ambition and a drive that we need to build awareness around how common it is. I was really struck by how, now the roll-out of universal credit is complete, almost half of children are living in households where somebody is in receipt of universal credit. There is a disconnect there. When we talk about issues of social security or as people normally talk about welfare, we imagine or we manifest it as if it is a minority, but it is a normal, everyday part of life. That is something that we need to challenge and change, especially if we are going to generate political will for further action on child poverty.

By listening to people in poverty, I think we have a better understanding of what I call the psychosocial experience of poverty. That may not affect policies for reducing the numbers, but it can affect policies for making the experience of poverty for those who are still in it, of which there are still going to be very many, a bit more bearable, particularly when we think about public services, the training of professionals and officials, involving people with experience of poverty in that training and so forth, so that there is a better understanding of how many people in poverty feel dehumanised or humiliated with lack of recognition and respect.

Just quickly: that is a very important point—

Very quickly, Edward. We are seriously over time.

A number of times, we came up with a set of policies based on the tax benefit simulation and the data and said, “This looks great,” but then we took it to people who are in poverty and it just did not align with their lived experience of it. The data can tell you one thing, but you should really speak to people as well.

Absolutely. That is why we have this lovely panel. We will move on now to Joy Morrissey, and then to Caroline Voaden.

We have heard that there are concerns about the quality of the family resources survey because of falling response rates and the impact that it may be having on poverty reporting. Do you share those concerns? Are there ways in general that you would recommend the Government improve their data collection at a national and local level? Is there any European model that you have seen or any country that you think is a good model as a reporting standard?

The FRS is foundational to poverty measurement and is struggling with quality response rates. Linking to benefit records is helpful. One of the challenges with low response rates in surveys is they can remain representative, but you are going to miss out on some of the smaller groups. Some of those groups will be those at particular risk of poverty, so that is a challenge. Going back to the point about persistence and trying to identify people who are persistently in poverty, with point-in-time surveys like the FRS you are not going to get that. I do think that a measure of persistent poverty—however you define poverty, but being able to identify families that are persistently in that state—is important. It is a case of using longitudinal surveys and understanding society. There was a persistent poverty indicator target previously, and income dynamics statistics are produced every year that get persistent poverty. That is an important tool to understand and track that poverty.

I am not an expert on the FRS, but it is also about a plea for a recognition of the value of qualitative research and evidence basis, especially because they have an explanatory power. We were hearing earlier from Ed about how we can see a change but cannot necessarily identify what has caused the change. The beauty of qualitative research is that we can—especially the gold standard of qualitative longitudinal research, where we follow families over time and witness the absence of change in people’s lives. The other thing—I will be quick—is that with things like FRS there are lags in reporting or it takes time for things to show up. When we have done work on the benefit cap and the two-child limit, or when we did the work on Changing Realities or the Scottish child payment, we get a real-time evidence base. Through Changing Realities, for example, we can speak to somebody this week who has been affected by the two-child limit. Too often, people say, “Well, that’s an isolated case—it’s just one person.” We need to say, “No, let’s hear that experience.”

That is a very good point.

My follow-up is to you, Ruth, and you have begun to touch on it there. We know that there are many families who are distrustful of public services and of Government, who might not want to respond or participate in surveys. Is there anything that the Government could learn from the work you have done with Changing Realities to help improve engagement?

It is confusing having multiple Ruths. There is a lot, and Debbie will tell me off, so I will just say that there is real value in thinking about “seldom heard” rather than “hard to reach”. It is about our language. I would also say that if the Government and policymakers want to engage with some of the seldom heard group, they need to think about the language they use in the public forum. Far too often, it has become easy to stigmatise, stereotype, belittle or individualise. If that is the starting point, you are going to experience that distrust. The last thing I will say, because of time—but I can come back to this if anybody wants me to, or I can follow up with a written submission—is “Don’t do it on your own.” Too often, there is a desire for control. The DWP or the DFE, or even your Committee, might think, “We’ll commission somebody,” or “We’ll just get some seldom heard groups in.” That is not going to work. You need to work in partnerships with organisations and groups like Changing Realities who are doing this work well and have the expertise in how to do it. Not trying to do it on your own is an important thing.

I want to follow up on the questions about monitoring and evaluation and push a little on the question of targets. The Children’s Commissioner for England has said that the Government should have a target of zero children in deep material poverty. That is something that everybody would like to see. We all see the egregious nature of deep material poverty for children and the moral imperative to eradicate it. In how the Government measure meaningful progress towards their strategy objectives, and in how Select Committees hold the Government accountable for that progress, how helpful is a target of zero?

My starting point would be that I support targets. They do not necessarily have to be legally based, but ideally they would be. It is important that the baseline report in the summer includes some kind of target. Usually, when people talk about a target of zero child poverty, they mean that it should be below probably 10%, because it is not realistic to think that there will be absolutely nobody; you will always find somebody. I welcome the Children’s Commissioner’s ambition in pushing for such a target, but it should not detract or draw attention away from the broader targets of getting down the numbers in relative poverty, in terms of income. As for the Government’s argument, I supported Lord Bird in pushing for targets and I was not terribly impressed by the responses that we got to that. The argument that it is just pushing people over a line—well, if you have a deep poverty target, it is not that, so you have both. If we look at Scotland, targets there have proved useful in keeping the Scottish Government on with its policy. They proved useful under the last Labour Government, and a lack of targets could be seen as a Government not showing confidence in their own strategy.

On the question of what a meaningful set of targets would look like, is it an adequate interpretation of what you are saying that targets are needed but that you need a mixture of different targets with different levels of stretch? So ambition is important, to speak to the Children’s Commissioner’s point, but so are achievable targets along the way that help to get there.

That is a very good way of putting it. I would argue that if the Government do not like the word “targets”, perhaps we could go for “milestones”. We need something to help parliamentarians, stakeholders and people in poverty to hold the Government to account.

The work by the Child Poverty Action Group has referred very clearly to the need for targets, milestones or missions, like mission-led government, that are both ambitious and realistic. I think its suggestion was something like aiming to halve it in a decade and eradicate it in 20 years. As Ruth says, “eradication” would really mean getting it down to below 10%. Ruth rightly points to the Scotland example, and we are seeing that divergence in poverty rates, but it is also important to compare Scotland with Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland has a commitment on child poverty but no measurable targets, and we see that in action in Scotland—there is that drive. Finally, it is part of the public drive as well, to be able to stand up and say that we are committed to tackling poverty and we want to eradicate child poverty. That helps that public narrative as well.

Sticking with the targets theme, I agree that you need to have that ambition and to be working against something, but should we not drill down a bit more? We have talked about poverty and its complexities, having targets and monitoring the strategy and the impact on different groups. When I go to schools in my constituency, the teachers and heads tell me that it is the low-income white British families they are particularly worried about. When I was a council leader in London you could add to that, in the area I represented, black Caribbean children as well as white children on free school meals. Some of those groups, persistently over decades, get left behind. In monitoring it, how can we make a difference to those—I would argue—hard-to-reach groups and track what is happening to them?

As I said earlier, with that deep and complex poverty definition, where you are identifying families that have particular sets of issues, tracking poverty rates would help. Within the HBAI report, there are statistics on poverty rates for lots of different characteristics of families, which are repeated annually. It is quite straightforward to see trends in those statistics for different groups and particular family types. Whether that is through their socio-demographic characteristics, which are easy to measure and identify, I suppose, or whether it should be around the combination of drivers that they have, which points to families that have disadvantages that policy would focus on rather than just being based on their characteristics—that is the question. We would say that you should push for a measure that identifies that complexity, so it gives you a feel for the challenges that the family have, whether it is around employment or health or family size, rather than being purely based on their sociodemographic characteristics.

The Scottish Government have identified six priority groups that they are using as a lens through which to analyse progress. There is always a trade-off between trying to dig down and have lots of different targets for different groups and categories, and having a very clear set of objectives that a Government are working towards. We just have to be a little bit cautious about that trade-off.

I agree. Yes, we need to monitor the impact on different groups, but we do not want too many different targets, because then the targets become a bit meaningless. Could I also just throw in the fact, because we are probably not going to have time to address it, that a group that is so often overlooked is migrant children whose parents have no recourse to public funds? They are disproportionately at risk of poverty. The sector was very pleased to see them acknowledged in the child poverty strategy, but there is nothing actually in the strategy that will immediately improve their position. I hope that they will be included in the monitoring. Q55 Rushanara Ali: My question is about the current geopolitical tensions and their impact on our economy, cost of living pressures and energy costs, and whether there has been work done around the projections of more children falling into poverty. In terms of the strategy itself, we have the very welcome numbers of children who will be lifted out of poverty, but with a risk of a recession if the crisis is not prevented from going on for a long period, what does that mean for in-work poverty? Do you think that alongside the strategy, the Government need to be thinking about what they can do to mitigate more children falling into poverty?

I think the Resolution Foundation has done some analysis modelling different outcomes—it may have come out just this week. It reminds us that it is the poorest who are most at risk from escalating energy prices and the cost of essentials, because so much more of their income goes on those essential items. That is another reason why engagement with lived experience is so important. With the work I am doing on Changing Realities, we are getting diary entries in lived experience all the time, talking about the impact that it is having already and the ways in which that pressure is just becoming harder and harder. We had an example from somebody called Ronnie at the beginning of this month, who was saying how she feels successful when she has bought food for dinner and she still has access to the internet. At the moment, she has oil heating and is having to go to Home Bargains to try to heat the house a bit before bedtime, but Home Bargains is out of stock for a week. Having that engagement with everyday realities is so important for understanding policy responses.

Clearly, the people who are already so vulnerable and insecure are the most vulnerable and insecure in what we are facing at present as a nation. I do not think we should be pitting their security against national security and arguing for cuts in social security spending, which some people are doing, because we are going to need that basic support more than ever for those who are already in such serious deep poverty.

You have mentioned, in different ways, lived experience and the importance of hearing people’s stories. The Government are going to produce a baseline report in the summer—which might mean autumn—around a monitoring and evaluation framework. In your view, how should we effectively measure the impact of the strategy and its success, particularly by incorporating that experience?

In 30 seconds, I would say that we need to recognise people with experience of poverty as experts. We need to value their views not just as a form of testimony, but in telling us whether this is working or not working. As part of the monitoring and evaluation, I think there is a commitment within the DWP to some new qualitative longitudinal research with families, which is valuable. What I would argue for is a small group, almost like a committee of six to eight parents, that we could return to bi-monthly and say, “How are your lives? How are they changing?” As Rushanara Ali’s question alluded to, things are changing over time. Yes, one thing, the two-child limit, might be gone, but then energy prices might be sky-high. I think we need a small group of lived experience experts who are part of the monitoring framework and that we return to over time.

That concludes the first panel of this second session. Witnesses: Alun Francis, Carl Cullinane and Daniel Lilley. [Helen Hayes in the Chair]

Welcome to the second half of our scrutiny session on the Government’s child poverty strategy. This is part of our joint inquiry between the Education Select Committee and the Work and Pensions Select Committee, looking at the effectiveness of the Government’s child poverty strategy. I am Helen Hayes, the Chair of the Education Committee, and I will be chairing the second half of this evidence session. May I ask our three witnesses to introduce themselves, starting with the two witnesses who are in the room?

Hi there, everyone. My name is Daniel Lilley. I am the head of youth at the Centre for Social Justice.

I am Carl Cullinane. I am the director of research and policy at the Sutton Trust.

Online, we have Alun Francis.

Hello, my name is Alun Francis. I am the chair of the Social Mobility Commission, and in my day job I am the chief executive of Blackpool and The Fylde further education college.

Thank you all very much for taking the time to give us your evidence today. In the child poverty strategy, and in the subsequent schools White Paper, the Government have set out a number of policies to support disadvantaged children in schools, including extending free school meals, support with uniform costs and improved pupil premium funding. Do you think that these policy interventions are the right ones? What impact will they have?

They are helpful, but I do not think that they are necessarily sufficient. Some of the roots of low educational attainment across the country are deep, and I do not think that we have in policy a robust understanding of how the process works. I think it is linked to the shape of our economy, with regional disparities. We see a clustering of low achievement in places in particular areas, and that has been the case for decades. The only place that has bucked that trend is London, which 20 years ago was one of the lowest-performing places and is now the highest-performing. The other areas, particularly post-industrial towns and seaside towns, have been persistently low-achieving. There is a complicated set of facts around this, and there is a very big distinction in how well the children of graduate and non-graduate families are doing. I mean on average; I do not mean every individual case. Getting underneath that and understanding the issues behind it are important if we want to give everybody their opportunity. I also think that there is a real dilemma about how we measure outcomes here, because we seem to have a slight double standard. On the one hand, we measure the disadvantage gap through educational achievement, focused on academic qualifications; on the other hand, there is a debate taking place about whether they really capture the range of qualities that people need to do well in life and work. Perhaps they reward those who have those academic inclinations over others and therefore our measure is partly at fault. I will leave it at that for now, but if you want to ask further questions I am happy to answer.

There was a lot to welcome in both the child poverty strategy and the White Paper, in particular the reinvigoration of the Best Start family hubs. An increased roll-out there will have a substantial impact on outcomes. Investing in early years is obviously key. The evidence shows that the impact of material poverty is at its greatest in those early years, so support at that stage is incredibly important. There are questions about the scale of the roll-out and about the monitoring and evaluation of the model, making sure that the right programmes are being delivered by the family hubs, as well as addressing some variability in provision across the country. We and a lot of other organisations welcomed the scrapping of the two-child limit, which will have a material impact on the income of the poorest and will address some of the immediate pressures on costs, particularly food poverty and the real precarity of living week to week. That has tangible impacts on children in school. If you are hungry, it is much more difficult to learn. Over recent years, schools have reported that kids are more distracted and do not have the right uniforms or clothes. That really has an impact on their day-to-day learning. In the same vein is the extension of free school meal eligibility, which we have been calling for over a number of years, and the expansion of breakfast clubs. I agree with Alun that this may not be sufficient to narrow the gaps, given the scale of the gaps that we see. These are incredibly deep-seated issues that will require very long-term solutions. The measures that have been brought in are positive and should have a short-term impact, but we need to see some of these policies developing, made more ambitious and sustained over time.

I concur with many of the astute comments of the other two witnesses, who have covered a lot of the key bases. It is helpful, when thinking about the child poverty strategy, to zoom out a little to what we are trying to achieve. As was discussed at length in the previous panel, if we are focused on the number of children in child poverty as measured by relative low income, most of these education measures are very unlikely to have a substantial impact. The main thing they seek to do is unlock educational opportunity for children, which can improve their life prospects for decades to come but will not necessarily be likely to have a large impact on the child poverty number. If we look instead at how we can have an education system where the opportunities for disadvantaged children to thrive are as good as they can be, I think these measures are much more important and much more encouraging. On the excellent point that Alun made about geographic disparities, one thing we at the Centre for Social Justice would say we need to push much more is thinking about those children for whom the academic route from GCSEs to A-levels and university is not the most appropriate pathway. There is nothing really for those children in our education system. They are highly likely to become not in education, employment or training and to be in unstable work in future, if they find it. To have an education system in which we can try to rebalance and improve our technical pathways, alongside academic pathways, could be an exciting thing. As a final note on geographic disparities, one way we see them is in how much London dominates the education system and how much it is designed around what works in the capital. If we look at Progress 8 scores—performance at GCSE relative to performance at age 10—we see that everywhere in the country other than London is negative, but London is more positive than anywhere is negative; it is that larger gap. We see the same trend in higher education progression, and there is a sense that of course we do because those professional jobs are also the jobs that are concentrated in the capital. There is a larger question to ask about the sweep of the education system around having exciting opportunities with a line of sight to work for disadvantaged children.

The schools White Paper sets out an approach to place-based missions. As a London MP I can certainly speak to the impact that the London Challenge had on transforming educational outcomes across the capital. What is your view of the approach to place-based missions that the Government have articulated? What is needed to make them successful? Are there any risks, for example, as we saw with the London Challenge, where one area of the country does substantially better but there might be areas that are comparable in the extent of need and disadvantage that do not get the focus of a mission and are therefore allowed to fall behind? Briefly if you can, because we have lots of questions to ask you, what is your view of the place-based approach that the Government have outlined?

First, it is to be welcomed. Certainly, from a Social Mobility Commission point of view, we need to rewrite our social mobility strategy in this country and focus on a place-based approach to social mobility. I am happy to talk about that at length, but I am sure we have not got time for all the detail today. I would say that we have to be careful about the differences between London and everywhere else. We know all the data that the Social Mobility Commission has published shows that social mobility of the Dick Whittington type, the bottom-to-top mobility, is much more likely to happen to you if you live in London than anywhere else in the country. All the outcomes are better for poor children in London than they are elsewhere in the country. There are reasons for that, which we probably do not fully understand, but I will try to shine a torch on the issues as I see them. The social demographic in London is very different. There are a lot of highly aspirational immigrant families who value education very highly. It is important to remember that not all poor children do badly. There are real differences within the group, and one of the problems with the disadvantage gap is that it ignores the differences within the group. You can see that by ethnicity and by place. When we start to think about the communities outside London, I am sure that Members who are representing those communities will recognise lots of what I am about to say. They work very differently: their economy is different, the communities are different, ambitions and cultural attitudes are different, expectations are different and the institutions are different. London has been able to drive these changes by attracting very high-performing graduates into teaching in London schools. If you go to some of the seaside towns, they find it very difficult to recruit ambitious young teachers. These are just indicators of the differences; I think there are some wider issues underpinning it. I would also say—I hope that this is not overly controversial but provokes a bit of debate and thought—that there is a lot of attention given to left-behind places and particularly young men. If we want to solve child poverty, we have to think about what career options and what life cycle opportunities there are for young women who do not go to university and live in those places—the mums, actually. The pattern of having your first child is very different for a non-graduate and a graduate. I will give you a couple of very quick statistics. The age at which you have your children is very different, and then the likelihood of being in a stable relationship is very different. This is not about lone parents; this is about at the point at which your child is born, whether the child lives with both parents or does not at any point in time. These are tied up with quite important differences between the opportunities we give to graduates—who tend to marry graduates, tend to be mobile and tend to access the highest employment—and what is happening to non-graduates in terms of their families and their communities. If we do not recognise some of those differences and some of the challenges in left-behind places, which are also about the transience of the community, the nature of housing and all kinds of related issues, we will not be able to repeat the London Challenge or the Greater Manchester Challenge or the opportunity areas, if that is what we have in mind—we have tried those things and they did not work. We need to think harder about how we address the issue of creating real opportunities for poorer families and for the parents in those families, because we know the link between parental education and children’s outcomes is very strong.

Following up on that last point, the key thing is that we have to learn from these previous initiatives. There have been so many previous programmes, from education improvement areas to education action zones and opportunity areas. We should be learning from the best of those. Some of the key learnings that have come through from those previous programmes were about the balance between local buy-in and local ownership alongside national investment and sustained national investment. If you do not have both those things, it is just not going to result in the outcomes that you want. There have been positive signs in terms of increasing local collaboration, knitting across services from education, welfare, family support and health, and those increasing local collaborations can have a real impact. However, as Alun says, some of these impacts are limited by local labour market conditions. While Mission North East and Mission Coastal are good places to start in terms of outcomes, what you would like to see is a much broader strategy that encompasses wider areas of the country and helps to knit together the education side of things and the broader economic health of those areas. Without that more holistic strategy, you are not going to see the long-term impact that you would like.

Those were very strong answers, again, from the other panellists. To try to provide something extra, looking at the London Challenge as something that is both encouraging and cautionary, I would suggest that part of the reason why the London Challenge caused London to become so far ahead was that there were other parts of the London economy and local economy that were doing very well. In that context, I think the place-based missions now are particularly helpful. If we look to the north-east, for example, yes, we have poor educational attainment and a real disadvantage there. We have twice the rate of children living in workless households that we have in London. We also have much more vulnerable family formations, so the likelihood of a child being with their parents when they are five is much lower than in London. When we consider that the complex web is all pointing in the direction that these areas need attention, it is encouraging to see that. It is a very good idea. Q59 Darren Paffey: What policies do you think the Government should be adopting to improve educational outcomes for children in poverty, particularly bearing in mind what you have just been saying about this not being a carbon copy of the London Challenge? What could affect the rest of the country, taking my Southampton constituents as an example? We are in the south-east, so we often get lumped in with wealthy London and the south-east, yet the poverty is sufficient to depress our educational outcomes below the national average. Whatever comes or whatever policies there are has to be able to improve the lives of poor children there. What would some of those policies look like?

I think there is a tension in the early years in particular, with the positive Best Start in Life programme but a lack of provision of early education to those from poorer backgrounds. Of the bottom third of the income distribution, 80% are not eligible for the 30-hour entitlement from nine months to four years of age. That means that they are shut out of high-quality education. It contributes to the attainment gap and the school readiness gap before they even start school, and that only continues to widen afterwards. There is a real tension there that needs to be resolved if we are to deliver on the promise of the rest of the Best Start in Life strategy. I would also say we need a more concerted plan around the attainment gap in schools. There was a welcome commitment to having the disadvantage gap in the schools White Paper, but in terms of the policies already announced, they are unlikely to reach that target. We need to take further steps in that direction, in particular by looking at funding from the national funding formula and rebalancing funding towards areas that need it most; improving Pupil Premium funding and targeting it at those who need it the most; looking at things like teacher recruitment in the most disadvantaged areas to improve schools in those disadvantaged areas; and looking at school segregation across the country. There is a very strong social segregation in schools between the more affluent and least affluent areas. If you are a poor student, even if you live in the catchment area of a good school you are much less likely to go to it. We need to look at school admissions as part of the process if we are to build that base for future opportunity.

One thing we have found, looking at the school absence crisis, is that where children are struggling in education, the variables that are most often causing it are in the web around their life more broadly, as opposed to what is going on in their school experience directly. Time and again, when we speak to charities in our CSJ alliance up and down the country, two things in particular come up: relationships in the home and worklessness. If a child has a secure and loving relationship with their parents or guardians and there is stability at home, and similarly if there is work at home that is modelled to them, then generally speaking disadvantage in terms of income measures becomes much less relevant to their educational opportunities. In many ways, the policies that would be most effective in unlocking that opportunity are not directly about how we operate schools, but about how we make sure that the child’s life is such that school can be as effective as it can be. Time and again, that comes down to relationship support so that they have the best possible chance of having limited conflict at home and having both of their parents around. Then it is about support to get parents into work to ensure that working life is modelled to the child, that they are not the only person heading out of the home in the morning, that they know what it means to have a job, and that there are some careers that they have seen and have access to, so they can think, “Oh, I would like to do that with my life.” School then feels tangible. To give two specific policies to that end, one is around perinatal relationship support for parents. There has been brilliant expansion in Best Start family hubs, as has been mentioned, and there has been some excellent expansion in children’s social care in terms of relationship support, but preventative work to ensure that children have the best chance possible of their parents staying together is something that is not done much. Instead, we focus on purely medical things in that time. That would be one thing. The second thing is around support to get people into work who are on health benefits—talking therapies instead of just cash, so that you can try to find what is causing the challenge for the person and get them into work so that their child can have that modelled to them and improve their educational opportunities.

I will not repeat things that other people have said, but policy churn is a problem. We start things, we do things and we change them. We are constantly changing things in education, in early years, in schools and post 16. It means that we never become really good at anything. That is combined with the second problem, which is that we are very poor at evaluation and learning from our mistakes and building knowledge about what genuinely works. I would just flag up those issues right at the beginning. There is then a range of measures. In some respects, we know quite well what works. There is a whole body of work on early years and its importance in child development. We have a pretty good idea of what works in schools, but what we struggle to do is roll that out across the country. I mentioned earlier the improvement of schools in London, but we do not seem to be able to replicate that improvement elsewhere. Part of the challenge here is that we need to go a little beyond short-term measures and take a long-term approach. That is difficult, given the political cycle and various other things. There is an immediate pressure to get results, but I do not think that there are quick fixes to some of the problems we are talking about. What we need is some policy consistency over a long period. We need to be really focused on what we are asking our early years practitioners to do. Are we asking them to meet a target that we have set or are we asking them to help families create the best environments for children to develop their cognitive, emotional and other skills? For me, that is the core. Somebody made the point earlier that relationships are key. It is not just about material wellbeing; it is about psychological transmission of wellbeing, emotional stability and all those factors that help people to achieve in life and make the best of their abilities, academic or otherwise. For me, that is about stretching our imagination a bit and thinking about policies that integrate the need to create better opportunities for communities across the country. That is partly about the economy, but it is also about strengthening public services and other things around some common goals. That is about thinking about devolution more radically and how we can be more inventive in solving problems based on place. That is the area where I would say that we need a long-term approach. That is not to say that there are not some short-term things that can be done in the meantime—others have mentioned some of them—but if we want to get through to this problem, which is inter-generational and has been with us for quite a long time, we need a long-term view and a place-based approach. Q60 Darren Paffey: Very briefly: in the Government strategy and in quite a lot of the panel’s answers there has rightly been a focus on early years and primary-age children. Do you think that there ought to be something specific, policy-wise, for secondary age children to improve educational outcomes? I do not necessarily need you all to answer, but if anyone has a burning response, that would be helpful.

I would like to respond, if I may. I do not think that it is just about secondary; I think you have to look at adult learning. It is about parents, too, and about communities. Adult learning is a neglected part of the system. It is crucial to being able to address these issues, because if we do not improve the outcomes for parents, we are saying that it is for early years practitioners and schools to do that on their own. The holistic approach has to start with adult learning and think about the education system as a whole, and that is not just about children.

Dan, do you have a quick point to make on that?

That was excellent, actually. Vocational education is another big one, in terms of having that balance of pathways—that was what I was going to say on that.

One quick thing I would add is that the pupil premium ends at GCSEs and does not extend into post-16 education. Disadvantage does not end at 16, so we should ensure that funding supports those who stay in school. Q61 Chris Vince: Daniel, you were talking about the importance of relationships at home and modelling work. I declare an interest: I am the chair of the APPG for young carers and young adult carers. Without giving you an answer, would you suggest that there is definitely a clear need for Government to focus policies on young carers, because in those two particular measurements they are going to struggle, aren’t they?

That is an extremely important point, and it also illustrates that when we talk about family relationships it is more complicated than just the relationship between a child’s parents. Yes, I agree that that is also an important part of it. I suppose the biggest-scale family relationship variable is also underrepresented in conversations, which is whether the child’s parents are married. That has a huge impact on whether the child’s parents are likely to be together when they are 16. Because obviously that is the family’s decision, we feel uncomfortable mentioning it as a variable, but it is highly significant in a child’s opportunity. I would completely agree with you; I would just highlight that as another example of the various areas within that theme.

My question is for Alun Francis. You have spoken previously about your frustration about how disadvantage is badly defined in education, and how too often time is not spent working with the most disadvantaged. In your opinion, how should Government policy ensure that we are reaching the most disadvantaged children?

I think part of the problem with the way we use what I would describe as binary definitions of disadvantage—free school meals, family income, the area you live in and so forth—is that they are all helpful in shining a light on where we should put our attention, but statistics give us average outcomes, and individuals are never completely average. The key is to try to understand what the baskets of issues are that might affect a particular individual. That also means thinking hard about things like the way we set targets. For example, I want to pick up the point about the disadvantage gap and the pupil premium. I understand why Carl and others are supportive of that, but it worries me, in all honesty, because I think what those initiatives tend to mean is that the institutional behaviour that follows is to focus on the marginal gains that can be made. This often happens with improvement programmes like London Challenge, too. We look at the students who are marginal in terms of a grade D to a grade C, for example, because that helps meet the target, but we tend to then ignore the wider issues around disadvantage. Those who are in the most need often do not see a great deal of intervention in that respect. One of my concerns is that we sometimes need to think about the implications of the way we tackle these problems, because we create incentives to do the wrong thing rather than the right thing. What we need is a proper strategy for saying we need to pick people up on the basis that they are falling behind. I am sorry that I have not given you a coherent explanation of every single measure we might do, but I will give you one example. In post-16 education, about 220,000 children entered post-16 education without their English and maths. It is true that you are much more likely to fail English and maths at GCSE if you come from a poor background, whichever definition we use, than from a more advantaged background. However, if we look at the absolute numbers, those who are disadvantaged, using whatever measure, are smaller in number than those who are apparently advantaged, because 99,000 met the definition of disadvantage whereas 120,000 did not. My point would be that they are all disadvantaged, because they have not got their English and maths. Sometimes the way we set targets does not encourage us to focus on the disadvantage that we need to solve. We want those young people to all enter the labour market with an equal and fair chance in life. That is a theme that runs through policy more generally. It is about focusing on solving the problem we want to solve, whereas sometimes the metrics and the targets lead us away from that and give disincentives to deal with real human beings. Q63 John Milne: The Government set a bold ambition of halving the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers at GCSE. How far do you think the measures that have been set out on the child poverty strategy, and then in the schools White Paper, go towards meeting that goal? Carl, would you like to kick off?

Yes. I have said already that there are a number of positive things in there. I think the extension of free school meals will be positive. Improving wider services and wider family support services, particularly through the family hubs, will have a significant impact. It will also help in early identification of problems, particularly SEND. SEND is contributing substantially to the disadvantage gap. The reforms that have been announced are, I would say, cautiously positive in addressing some of those issues in the long term. Early identification and intervention will be key to that. There are a number of measures under consultation later in the year, so I think some of it remains to be seen, such as the national funding formula and how much funding is being directed to schools with the greatest needs and facing the biggest challenges. We can see that the pupil premium has been massively cut in real terms relative to inflation over the last few years. There is also, going back to what Alun said, the way the Government are looking at how to measure the disadvantage that applies to these funding formulas. Bringing in a measure of household income, in particular, could solve some of the issues that Alun has identified in giving a less binary measure of disadvantage. That could be very helpful for both the national funding formula and the pupil premium, in particular with targeting those suffering the most, in the deepest and most persistent poverty, who all the statistics show are the ones who face the biggest challenges. We need to see a bit more of a holistic approach going beyond the White Paper, looking at teacher recruitment, particularly through a geographical lens, and looking at school admissions, but also looking at specific interventions. The national tutoring programme that was brought in during the pandemic was defunded a couple of years ago. Our research has shown that the level of tutoring provision in school has declined substantially since the end of that programme. The intention was that the pupil premium would fund tutoring in the longer term, but what we are seeing is a dramatic reduction. One-to-one and small-group tutoring is one of the most effective interventions a school can give, particularly to those from a disadvantaged background. More targeted investment on interventions like that will be key if we are to meet some of those targets. Similarly, pupil absence, as Daniel has mentioned, is a huge driver of the gap. What we need there is both a cultural shift in attitudes to school and attendance, which has gone in a negative direction over the last few years, and a stepping up of substantive interventions to address those with individual pupils.

Thank you—that was a very thorough answer. Daniel, is there anything you want to add?

I would start by saying that it is an extraordinarily ambitious aspiration, to the point where one has to be somewhat sceptical, particularly considering the vague framing. It was an ambition, and it was by the time this generation had finished school. It feels as though there are intentionally no sharp edges to how that was pledged. For context, in 15 years of the disadvantage gap being a key educational priority, its total variation from the high point to the low point has been 11%, a fifth of what it has targeted. That is an unbelievably ambitious aspiration for something that does not have a huge plan as to exactly how on earth that will be done. I have two very quick observations, though, that I would want to colour in, points that have already been made on the disadvantage gap. First, we did a piece of research looking at the effectiveness of pupil premium, obviously where the measure came in from, and one thing we found was that in the secondary schools where disadvantaged students perform better than the national average for all students—so in the schools that are doing well for disadvantaged students—the disadvantage gap is still quite large. Actually, for many of those schools it is larger than it is on average across the country, so the schools where disadvantaged students do the best still have a large disadvantage gap. My second observation is that the disadvantage gap, if we pick ethnicity as a characteristic, is far larger for white British children than it is for Chinese children. It is far larger than it is for black African children. It is far larger than it is for Bangladeshi children. Taking those two observations, I would come back to my earlier point—not to sound like a broken record—that it is often the web behind the child’s life more than the direct experience of school that is causing these things. It tends to come back to family relationships and worklessness. Why do disadvantaged Chinese children do so well? I would argue that those two things are highly relevant in that. Those would be my key observations on that ambition.

We are at the point in the proceedings when I need to encourage brevity so we can get through all the topics we want to ask you about, if that is okay. Do carry on.

Thank you. Alun, do you have anything to add?

I will be very brief, but I am just a sceptic where the disadvantage gap is concerned. I think it creates institutional behaviour that focuses on the margins. I do not think it looks at the wider issues underpinning that, which is where policy really needs to focus, and it tends to measure everybody against the same measure. It is a bit like taking every horse in the country, from show ponies to show jumpers to grand national racers, and saying, “You’ve all got to run the course at Aintree and jump over the same fences, and we will measure you on that basis.” What we need is something much more nuanced about measuring the ability for people to fulfil their potential, not to be measured against what is actually quite an arbitrary external measure. I am happy to deal with further questions if anybody wants to pick that up outside the meeting or in future, but I will leave it at that for now.

Just expanding on that point, I am interested in what you said earlier, Alun, about your apprehension about the way some people use the term “disadvantaged”, what that means and the complexity behind it. In terms of the attainment gap and the effect on disadvantaged children, however we define that, do you think the Government and the child poverty strategy do enough? Do we understand enough about what causes those gaps and those differences, whether it is ethnicity, class, gender or region? Do we know enough to develop the right policies to make a real difference?

Thank you for the question, because I think it is a brilliant one. We know a lot but we do not know everything. One of the things that is different in this country is the extent of regional disparities. The reason I mention that is that it goes back to my point earlier about families and areas of the country. I will just give you a quick stat on family formation, which is that 68% of people who are high-achieving educationally are likely to get married either before or at the point at which they have children. Only 6% will have children when they have no partner. If you look at people with low educational achievement and outcomes, only 17% are likely to be married and 29% are likely to not have a partner at the time the child is born. I am not raising it as a moral issue; I am raising it as a question about what it is that is driving people into these very difficult situations. I am saying it from a point of view of sympathy, not criticism. If I then tell you that the geography of that maps straight across to that data and tell you that—and I am not naming these places to shame them; I am naming them because we know that they have low education attainment—this is also a factor that is present in those communities, the areas with the highest numbers of children born when the parents have never been a couple. Some of these areas have up to 35% of children born in that situation: Knowsley, Hartlepool, Holton, Liverpool, Merthyr Tydfil, Blackpool. Many of the places I have worked feature on the list. Of the top 34 boroughs with the highest rates of non-partnered births, only five are in London. The rest are all across the post-industrial and seaside towns. The problem with families is that it is such a sensitive issue. People feel anxious about it. They do not want to be judgmental, they do not want to blame the victim and so on, and I get all that—I understand all that. However, I think we have to start to think hard about what has happened to the non-graduates in those communities that have been sometimes referred to as left behind, in particular young men and young women, what choices they have and what opportunities they see themselves as having. Very often when they have families, they are having them very young, they are not together as a couple, the man disappears, and the woman is then in a very difficult situation as to how she improves her circumstances from that point onwards. This appears to be linked to the cluster of issues; it is not that one issue causes the others. This is a cluster of issues that place children at risk, in terms of developing their full range of abilities the best we can. The answer to your question is that we know a lot, for example, about the importance of early years. There are Nobel prize-winning economists like James Heckman who have done loads of research on it. There are tons of examples of randomised computer trials across the world. We know quite a lot about what improves school performance. We might argue about some of the things on the margins, but we know quite a lot about that. What we do not understand is the other side of the equation: communities, families and what has happened to those families over a 30 or 40-year period in which we have seen the long-term implications of industrial decline. It has affected a lot of areas outside of London and its immediate surroundings. It is a unique feature, by the way, of this country. The level of non-partner births is much higher in the UK than anywhere else in the world. The country that comes nearest is the USA. Europe does not. The geographical patterns are unique to this country. It has to do with the extent to which, for 30 or 40 years, we have not solved the problem of a low-performing economy outside of London and the south-east. In fact, we have fuelled the growth of London and the south-east by taking our graduates out of areas like Oldham, Rochdale and Blackpool and sending them to London to work in professional and financial services, which has been great for them but not great for the areas they have left behind and certainly not great for the people who are left behind. There is no ecosystem for them to do well in. That is what we need to fundamentally solve because the geographical patterns to this are absolutely clear.

Thank you very much. All this is known. This evidence is known; I have heard it in lots of different places. It is good to hear it from you so eloquently today. Do you think that that evidence—the scale of it, the weight of it, the importance of it—is appreciated across Government?

No. It is a complex picture, which makes it very difficult for people to piece together the full jigsaw puzzle. That is a challenge. We tend to work and live in silos. I would argue that my motive for piecing this together comes from working persistently in areas that are left behind in one way or another, and asking simple questions. The reason I joined the Social Mobility Commission was, “What does social mobility mean to young people growing up in Oldham?” which is where I worked at the time, and now in Blackpool. The models that we have do not mean a lot to them. We need to develop models that do. That is where a lot of our work has been focused and why we are now working on a place-based strategy for social mobility that integrates economic, educational, social and cultural issues. The way of delivering that would be through a much more powerful devolution model.

My question is for Carl. The Sutton Trust has done a lot of work to highlight the double disadvantage faced by children in poverty who have SEND. What policies should be put in place to support this particular group of children?

As I said earlier, a key part of the disadvantage attainment gap is contributed by SEND. Early identification and support is important through the Best Start family hubs, but also through childcare and early education settings. We need to get more kids from disadvantaged backgrounds into those settings at an earlier stage so that we can support them earlier, before those problems bloom and affect them more greatly at later ages. There are also wider issues within the operation of the system more generally, as we have seen. There has been a lot of talk about the EHCP structure, which is a very high-stakes cut-off. When you have very high-stakes cut-offs, that tends to advantage those with the resources and the know-how to navigate those systems. Our research has shown quite substantial differences in the number of pupils with SEND and free school meals who are able to access those supports. The reforms announced earlier this year are positive from that perspective. It was important to retain EHCPs, particularly for reassuring the families who already have them, but what has been announced in terms of a more holistic offer across the range of needs is important. It reduces the high-stakes cut-off between EHCPs and just SEND support, because the funding for just SEND support over recent years has effectively been declining as more and more resources have been pumped into EHCPs. That stepped approach is positive in getting that support to more disadvantaged pupils. It is also about looking at the range of types of SEND. It is an extremely broad category, and the patterns are different depending on types of household. There is sometimes a bi-causal relationship. Some pupils who are from disadvantaged backgrounds are labelled as having SEND simply because they are behind, not because they have a diagnosable disorder, and we need to look at that. There is also a bi-causal relationship in terms of the impact of SEND driving people into poverty. Our research has shown that a lot of parents reduce their hours or leave their jobs in order to support their children, particularly those who have very high needs, and those families need support. The announcements that were made earlier this year were broadly positive, but as there is going to be a very slow lead-in over the next few years, we need to monitor that closely.

Thank you. I am going to bring in Caroline Johnson, very briefly. I do need to encourage brevity at this point with increasing urgency as we get towards our cut-off of 11.30 am. Q67 Dr Johnson: I will do my best. I want to go back to what Mr Francis said about women having children without a partner at the time of the baby’s birth, and understand your view on the causation behind that. Is this an unplanned pregnancy, is it failure of access to contraception, or is it predominantly related to a cultural shift in whether having a second parent is desirable or necessary?

There was an excellent report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in 2022 on this. I will send the reference through for anybody who wants to read it. It is a very nuanced and balanced report that pulls together what is quite a complex set of evidence. There are clearly changes in cultural expectations applying to all socioeconomic groups in relation to marriage, for example, cohabitation or non-partnered births, but the evidence in that report suggests that there is quite a distinct difference between people from different social backgrounds as to which of those categories they may end up in. It is very difficult to say without further research what the exact answer to your question is. Whether or not they are unplanned pregnancies is very difficult to say. What I would say—and this is an anecdotal observation—is that young people who come into an FE college are much more varied than people like to think. FE colleges tend to have students who perhaps have not done as well at school as those who might go to a more academic institution, but within that group there is huge variation and there are massive differences. We have done some work at Blackpool over the last few years on what I would call some of the most disadvantaged. We have looked at family size, the area they live in, the course they are on, and so on. We have collected some data on enrolment that has allowed us to look at that in a bit more detail. It is very early, embryonic research, if you like, but it does tend to show a strong pattern between which course you are on—particularly for what we call entry-level or level 1 courses, which are fairly introductory—and your family size, the number of siblings you have, and whether you live with one or both parents. There is a connection here. Understanding what sits behind it is much more complicated, but there are issues to do with the choices and options that graduates appear to feel they have, compared with non-graduates. I do not know whether that completely answers your question, but it is the best I can do at the moment.

I have three questions that I will condense into one for the sake of time. There are organisations and individuals that suggest that halving the attainment gap should be part of a cross-Government approach and target that does not sit solely with the DFE, but should be recognised by the child poverty strategy as a key measure in reducing child poverty. Teach First is one of the organisations that have said that. Should targets on reducing the attainment gap, or other targets relating to educational outcomes, be used to monitor and determine progress on the child poverty strategy? If so, which targets or indicators should be used? I am tempted to start with Carl on this one, if that is okay.

Yes, I think I agree. There are two broad goals of the poverty strategy: alleviating poverty itself, but also alleviating the impacts of poverty. Educational measures and labour market measures are key to the second one. There is no perfect measure of these things but the attainment gap at GCSE is a key one, measured either by progress or absolute attainment in terms of attainment date. Look at labour market outcomes as well: we now have the longitudinal educational outcomes data that shows the labour market earnings of people depending on their education and their social background. While it should be couched in a long-term sense, because social mobility is always viewed through the rear window, we should be thinking about what proportion of those in poverty now we can help to escape poverty in 10 or 15 years’ time.

I am going to move us on, if that is okay.

That is fine, yes.

I would ask other witnesses to follow up in writing if you have burning points to make in response to that question, just because of time.

I have a very quick question, I hope. Should the strategy include explicit targets relating to social mobility? If so, what targets might it set?

Yes. There is overlap with those two, so I will just give very brief thoughts. The first thing I would say is that child poverty is obviously a relative income measure. It has immense value, but educational opportunity is not what it is looking at. Having things that look at educational opportunity would be very helpful. The only other comment I would make is that when trying to understand the disadvantage of a child in terms of their educational opportunities, income is instructive but is also very reductive. Other things—worklessness, family structure and other related issues—are very helpful to understand that picture.

I would echo that. It overlaps with my previous answer. I do agree, but these are very long-term outcomes and we should not expect things to change quickly.

I would be very careful on the social mobility one. The question is which social mobility, because there are lots of different ways of measuring it. Some have a much greater impact on everyone and some end up being very focused on what we call the lucky few. I would also be very sceptical about setting macro targets based on attainment gaps and so on. There are a number of reasons, but one is that they are not always as scientific as people like to think. Some of the statistical quirks in there can be lost by having a very crude gap. Here is the question I would leave you with. Would we be happy if 50% of every socioeconomic group did well and 50% did badly? Would we be happy that the group outcomes were equal but we still had 50% of the population not doing that well? My concern is that if we ever use a gap, we must weight it by looking at the actual number of people who are not doing well. Otherwise, you get a very artificial view of what you are doing. You are just playing off one group against another, and that is not a recipe for a happy society.

We will go to Peter Swallow for a final question.

Alun, this is to you as well. The Social Mobility Commission was originally set up following the previous child poverty strategy, in order to monitor it. What role, if any, do you expect the SMC to play in monitoring progress of this new child poverty strategy?

I am glad you have mentioned our previous role. It is quite an interesting question, although I know we do not have time to delve into that. Partly it depends on whether you want a narrow or a wider view of the role of the commission. Any Member of Parliament can ask the commission to look at various issues and give advice. We will do our best to draw on the evidence we can to advise how that should best be done. We could give you some advice on this particular question and look at the data we have and how that might help you. I would say, though, that I am increasingly of the view that the role of the commission needs to be broader, based on all the things I have talked about. I think it needs to measure a wider set of factors that relate to good outcomes for every child. They start off with places, economic opportunity and the whole range of things that we have talked about. There is a narrow answer to your question, and if we could deal with that in an advice note I think it would be very helpful, but there is a broader issue for us. Perhaps the role that the commission more broadly should have is about trying to capture opportunity across the country, and in that respect it is about good growth as much as traditional concepts of social mobility.

That is very helpful and I appreciate that answer, but very specifically, will the commission be including updates on the progress of the strategy in its annual reports, alongside all the broader work that you want to be doing?

In the sense that we already cover a range of measures, most of the things that would be relevant to the child poverty strategy will be measured in there. We have a whole bank of data around outcomes for children, intermediary outcomes and long-term outcomes. In that respect, yes, and I am sure we will be able to make reference to the strategy specifically. If we want to talk about the wider issues we have talked about today, that is a slightly different question.

I thank all three of our witnesses for taking the time to give us their evidence today. It has been a fascinating session. I am sorry that, as always, we were constrained on time and could not always get into the depth of detail that we would have liked. Please do write to the Committees with any further points that you were not able adequately to get across in the time available. That brings our evidence session to a close.