May 2015 – Comment and analysis

Keeping children in care out of trouble

Posted on May 22, 2015May 2, 2023 by policystudies

Dr Jo Staines outlines the Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies’ involvement in ‘Keeping children in care out of trouble’, an independent review of looked after children in the criminal justice system.

Some statistics that cause concern: only 3% of children in the community offend in any one year, yet over twice this number of looked after children do so (7.9%, Department for Education, 2011a). Furthermore, despite less than 1% of the UK’s child population being in care (looked after by local authorities), almost 50% of the children in custody are, or have been in care. And, while girls constitute only 5% of the youth justice secure population, 61% are, or have been, in care compared with 33% of boys (Prison Reform Trust 2014).

Along with professional associations, service user groups, academics and practitioners working across the care and youth justice systems in England and Wales, we have been invited to join the Prison Reform Trust’s recently established review of looked after children in the criminal justice system.

We have nine months to explore the intersection of the care and youth justice systems, and how involvement in one correlates with involvement in the other. This will encompass a broad range of care settings, from foster care to local authority residential care and private care settings. To do this we will synthesise and analyse existing research, both national and international; identify current good practice and local protocols; and seek the views of children and young people, their families, foster carers and residential staff about their experiences of both care and justice.

From this evidence base, the review will develop recommendations for national policy and practice and, importantly, an implementation strategy to ensure that the findings of what promises to be a significant review are widely disseminated and embedded within practice.

The State has a legal and moral duty of care to these looked after children, but it is clear that their needs are not always met nor their rights upheld. This duty of care continues until the young person reaches the age of 21 but many looked after children move into independent or semi-independent care much earlier, and may be at a heightened risk of becoming involved in offending behaviour during this period of transition to adulthood.

Understanding the relationship between care and youth offending is complex: many of the risk factors for involvement in offending behaviour are the same as those that precipitate entry into the care system, such as the experience of abuse, neglect or violence, family instability and poor parenting, disadvantage and deprivation.

However, research also indicates that becoming looked after can both reduce and increase the likelihood of being involved in offending behaviour – the former through providing high-quality, stable placements that promote children and young people’s resilience (Schofield et al, 2012), the latter through looked after children being inappropriately drawn into the youth justice system through processes that may ultimately label and criminalise them for what, in other situations, would be considered ‘normal’ teenage rebellion. Practitioners are able to cite many examples where looked after children have caused damage to their foster or residential home, or their carers’ property, and have been charged with criminal damage or other offences – action unlikely to be taken by parents against children in their own families (Schofield et al 2014).

Rates of recidivism (repeat offending) for children and young people, particularly post-custody, are high, suggesting that involvement in the justice system itself can exacerbate, or at least fail to address, the difficulties and disadvantage that these children experience. The need to alternative ways of responding to children who offend is clear and the review will also consider how approaches such as early intervention and restorative justice can be used with looked after children to limit their involvement in offending behaviour.

The key challenges facing the review include maintaining a sharp focus within the intricacies of the two systems, both of which operate within complex and changing legislative frameworks. Both are bound by the welfare principle embedded within the Children Act 1989 and are guided by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, but other aspects of welfare and justice legislation may, at least at a surface level, appear to be contradictory and to have competing aims. Tensions exist between promoting the welfare of the child and upholding principles of justice, victims’ rights and public safety, but it is imperative that we find a way to realise this balance both in policy and in practice.

References:

Department for Education (2011a) Outcomes for children looked after by local authorities in England year ending March 2011

Department for Education (2011b) Children looked after by local authorities in England year ending March 2011

Prison Reform Trust (2014) Bromley Briefings Summer 2014, London: PRT

Schofield G, Biggart L, Ward E, Scaife V, Dodsworth J, Haynes A and Larsson B (2014) Looked after children and offending: Reducing risk and promoting resilience, London: BAAF

Jo Staines is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the BSc Childhood Studies programmes and a member of the Hadley Centre for Adoption and Foster Care Studies in the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol. She is a member of the Prison Reform Trust’s independent review of looked after children in the criminal justice system, and author of ‘Youth Justice’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Deprivation of necessities has become more widespread in Britain since 1999

Posted on May 15, 2015May 2, 2023 by policystudies

Deprivation of necessities has become more widespread in Britain since 1999

The 2008 financial crisis and subsequent austerity measures have seen the most sustained decline in household incomes since the 1930s. In this post, Eldin Fahmy examines their impacts on public perceptions of minimally adequate living standards, and on the extent of deprivation. Based upon analysis of survey data for 1999 and 2012, it seems that as households have been forced to ‘tighten their belts’, perceptions of minimum living standards have become less generous. At the same time the extent of deprivation has increased dramatically.

The 2012 UK Poverty and Social Exclusion survey (2012-PSE) is the latest and most comprehensive in a series of household surveys conducted since the early 1980s adopting a ‘consensual’ approach to poverty which reflect public views on minimally adequate living standards. Since our last survey in Britain in 1999, public perceptions of what constitute the ‘necessities of life’ have become less generous. Nevertheless, the proportion of adults in Britain deprived of these necessities has increased substantially since 1999.

Poverty in Britain today is widely understood in relative terms as an inability to take part in lifestyles and activities which are customary or widely approved in contemporary society due to insufficient resources. This requires direct observation of living standards and cannot be established simply be using arbitrary income thresholds. Since Mack and Lansley’s ground-breaking 1983 survey, surveys on poverty in 1990, 1999 and 2012 have therefore examined public views on minimally acceptable living standards and have incorporated these views within the definition and measurement of poverty itself.

One consistent finding emerging from these surveys has been the striking degree of public consensus across social groups (e.g. by gender, age, social class, income level, etc.) concerning the relative importance of different items and activities. Nevertheless, as deprivation is here understood to be relative to prevailing societal standards we should expect that perceptions of necessities will vary across time to reflect changing living standards, tastes and customs. What, then, do the British public view as necessities of life today and in what ways has this changed since our last survey in 1999?

Table 1 (below) shows the percentage of adults in 2012 and 1999 describing a comparable set of items and activities as ‘necessities’. In both 1999 and 2012 there is widespread agreement on many items, and perceptions of necessities extend far beyond what might be described as ‘basic’ needs to encompass a range of ‘social’ necessities. As predicted by relative deprivation theory, perceptions of necessities also reflect changes in prevailing living standards and consumption norms, for example, in relation to technological items which have become more widely available (and widely encouraged) over the 1999-2012 period.

Table 1: Percentage of people viewing items as necessities for adults in 1999 and 2012 in Britain

However, one implication of a relative approach is that during periods of declining living standards public perceptions of necessities may also become less generous. Given the sustained decline in household incomes and living standards arising from the 2008 financial crisis, it would be astonishing if this was not also reflected in public attitudes to the necessities of life. Table 1 suggests that this is indeed the case.

Many items record a substantial fall in the proportion of respondents who view them as necessities in 2012 compared with 1999, with those items where public support was more equivocal in 1999 witnessing an especially dramatic decline in approval. As household incomes have become more constrained, more basic necessities (towards the top of Table 1) are increasingly prioritised over more discretionary items. As we argue in our preliminary report, it seems that the public have scaled back their expectations regarding minimum living standards in ways which reflect the prevailing climate of austerity and pessimism. One consequence of recession and austerity program may be that the British public have ‘tightened their belts’ and now consider many things which in the past were viewed as essential to no longer be necessities.

However, even though public perceptions of minimum living standards became less generous, the extent of deprivation of necessities has nevertheless increased for adults in Britain over this period. Table 2 (below) shows the percentage of adults in Britain who lack different necessities in 1999 and 2012 because they cannot afford them. The proportion of adults unable to afford items and activities considered by the British public to be ‘necessities of life’ in 2012 has increased dramatically compared with 1999. For example, the percentage of adults unable to adequately heat their home has increased seven-fold, and the percentage unable to afford a damp-free home, or to replace broken electrical goods, or to afford appropriate clothes for job interviews has at least doubled over this period.

Table 2: Percentage of adults lacking items because they cannot afford them in 1999 and 2012 in Britain

There is now widespread agreement on what constitutes a minimally acceptable diet for adults, including two meals a day, fresh fruit and vegetables daily, and meat and fish every other day. However, an increasing number of adults are unable to afford to eat properly, with the percentage of British adults who are unable to afford at least one of these dietary essentials increasing from 5% in 1999 to 8% in 2012. Since Table 2 focuses on the same items measured in comparable ways in 1999 and 2012, there has been an absolute increase in social and material deprivation over this period amongst the British adult population.

Underpinning the growth in deprivation over this period has been a rising tide of income inequality over the 1999-2008 period which ensured that despite a period of sustained economic growth until 2008, the benefits of growth were for the most part not enjoyed by poorer households whose incomes and wages fell further and further behind those of the better-off in relative terms.

Following the 2008 recession there has been a modest decline in income inequality and relative income poverty, but this reflects an overall decline in societal standards rather than any absolute improvement in the circumstances of poorer households. Although this decline in living standards is also reflected in more restrictive public perceptions of necessities, the extent of social and material deprivation amongst adults in Britain has clearly increased substantially since 1999. Indeed, these findings reflect the situation in 2012 before the majority of proposed changes to welfare benefits came into effect. Since these measures are set to hit the poor hard, our findings almost certainly underestimate the true extent of social and material deprivation in Britain today.

Note: A longer version of this article was published in the Journal of Poverty and Social Justice (Vol 22, Issue 2) in October 2014.

This post was first published on the British Politics and Policy blog

About the Author

Dr Eldin Fahmyis Senior Lecturer in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol. He is a member of the ESRC-funded 2012 UK Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey research team (Ref: RES-060–25–688 0052).

Election Brief: Living standards in the UK have fallen

Posted on May 6, 2015May 2, 2023 by policystudies

Professor David Gordon discusses coalition arguments relating to living standards, a key aspect of tomorrow’s general election

A copy of the full Election Brief is available at: <http://www.poverty.ac.uk/editorial/uk-living-standards-pse-election-briefing>

The change in UK living standards is one of the key contested issues in the May 2015 General Election. The Coalition Government argues that living standards have increased since it came to power in 2010. The Labour Party and other opposition parties claim that living standards have fallen.

In March 2015, the Chancellor George Osborne presented evidence in his final Budget that living standards have increased. This evidence is misleading. Research from a range of reputable academic studies has shown that average income has fallen over the past five years and poverty has increased.

The latest available data clearly show that the living standards of the UK population have fallen, particularly since the April 2013 cuts in Social Security and other austerity measures took effect. More people in the UK are now in financial difficulties and increasing numbers are unable to afford both the necessities of life (such as two pairs of shoes) and minor luxuries, such as a one week holiday away from home. Both fuel poverty and utility bill arrears have increased. These are the stark conclusions from a comparison of the change in UK living standards between 2009 and 2013, based on early release data recently provided by the UK Government to the European Statistical Office (EUROSTAT).

In 2009, 45 per cent of people lived in households which did not have sufficient money to pay an unexpected expense; by 2013 this had increased to almost half (49 per cent) of the UK population (see Table 1). The figures also show that, for every single indicator of financial difficulty, more people were having problems in 2013 than in 2009. It is clear that both serious and more minor financial difficulties are increasing amongst the UK population, with over a third of people in 2013 having difficulties in making ends meet and over one in five people finding their housing costs a heavy burden.

Table 1: Financial Difficulties in the UK in 2009 and 2013

	2009%	2013%
Cannot pay unexpected expenses	45	49
Difficult to make ends meet	31	35
Housing cost are a heavy burden	17	22
Cannot afford a small amount of money to spend on yourself each week	14	21
In arrears on rent/mortgage, utility bills or HP during the last 12 months	9	13

The data also compares how the richest two-thirds of the UK populations’ standard of living changed between 2009 and 2013 (see Table 2). The percentage of people who could make ends meet without any difficulties fell from 69 per cent of the UK population to under two thirds (65 per cent). Only the very richest (those who could make ends meet very easily) saw no perceived fall in their living standards.

Table 2: No difficulties Making Ends Meet in the UK in 2009 and 2013

Ability to make ends meet?	2009%	2013%
Fairly easily	39	36
Easily	19	18
Very easily	11	11
Total – no difficulties	69	65

The Chancellor’s claim that living standards have risen is fallacious as the National Accounts household sector data that he used are primarily a measure of the movement of money not the living standards of households. Real Household Disposable Income (RHDI) measures the total income of households compared with the rest of the economy. There is no information about how the total expenditure or income is distributed at the individual or household level. Thus, if only the richest 1% have a rise in their incomes, this will also increase the average income in the household sector by exactly the same amount as if the increase had been shared equally by everybody. RHDI cannot provide a good or adequate measure of living standards. By shifting attention to the Real Household Disposable Income (RHDI) GDP measure, the Coalition Government has obscured the real impact on peoples’ lives of fallen living standards.

There is only one conclusion that can be drawn from the available scientific evidence – the majority of the UK population has suffered from a fall in their living standards during the current government’s term of office. Both the poor and the majority have indeed ‘all been in it together’ – only the richest appear to have escaped.

It is a shame that the Coalition Government was not prepared to release the latest statistical information on living standards to the public before the May 2015 election – fortunately, it has recently become available via the European Union.

Inaugural disability lecture at Staten Island College, New York today

Posted on May 5, 2015 by policystudies

A special lecture is taking place this today (05/05/2015), called ‘Curtains Up! Inclusive Research for Social Justice’. It is the inaugural lecture which has been funded by a TV personality in the USA, Geraldo Rivera, and is being given by Dr. Val Williams from Norah Fry Research Centre, School for Policy Studies, with Beth Richards from the Misfits Theatre Group, and Vicky Mason who is a PhD student at Norah Fry. Our link with Staten Island is through former colleague Barbra Teater, who is now living and working in New York, running the social work programme at the College of Staten Island, part of the City University of New York.

The lecture commemorates a notorious institution called Willowbrook State School, which housed literally thousands of children and young people with learning disabilities from around 1948 until its closure in 1987. Known as the last great disgrace in US disability services, Willowbrook was the subject of a TV expose by a (then young) Rivera in 1972. With his camera crew, he broke into the wards, revealing the filthy and animal-like conditions in which children were being kept. It makes for horrific viewing.

Since then, of course, much has changed. Val, Beth and Vicky will talk today about the exciting and important things achieved by people with learning disabilities, including Beth herself. The focus is on drama but also on inclusive research, and how important it is for people with learning disabilities to have their voices heard – something that is explored in the programme MSc Disability Studies: Inclusive Theory and Research hosted at the School for Policy Studies.

We hope to forge continuing links between Staten Island and the School for Policy Studies.

Capturing the benefits of ‘playing out’

Posted on May 1, 2015 by policystudies

School for Policy Studies academics work with a range of local interests. Playing out is a non-for-profit Bristol based organisation that encourages street play in the UK. Naomi Fuller, from playing out, has written this blog about how their work with the School is helping them to capture the benefits of such activity.

I stood turning the skipping rope for ages at our last playing out session. Tall ten-year-olds and sturdy toddlers queued to have a go at jumping in as I chanted “Mickey Mouse Built a House” on request. I watched them – some skipping deftly, others stopping and starting with the rope getting tangled, some squatting down to do some chalking close by while they waited and I wondered whether it was possible to unpick what was going on. Of course they were having fun, giggling and trying to hold hands and skip together, then running out of the turning rope to add chalked horns to the rainbow-coloured cow they had drawn together in the middle of the street. But is there any way to measure this activity. And is there any need?

A conference hosted recently by University of Bristol gave some clear answers to these questions. The event was called “Outdoors and Active: Delivering public health outcomes by increasing children’s active travel and outdoor play”. It gathered people working in local authority public health teams, education and play services to share new research showing beyond doubt that children at playing out sessions are getting more exercise and activity than they would if they were indoors during that same period. Dr Angie Page and Professor Ashley Cooper are lead researchers for the PEACH project, a long term study examining the links between the different physical environments children spend time in and how active they are in them. They and their team have already measured children’s activity levels on their school journeys – whether in cars, on foot or by bike, during the school day and in the after-school period, examining the length of time they spend outdoors and indoors and exactly how much physical exercise they do.

To carry out these studies and gather the data they need, researchers have kitted children out with GPS tracking devices which show precisely their location at every stage of their journey. Children have also worn ‘accelerometers’ which measure the intensity of their exercise and activity. Recently Angie and her research team have turned their attention to street play – visiting playing out sessions to measure the intensity and type of physical activity children are doing. As well as equipping the children with the technical kit, her team interviewed parents and children about their activity patterns and habits.

It’s the levels of ‘moderate to vigorous physical activity’ (MVPA) that are a key focus. Government guidelines are clear: children between five and eighteen need to get at least an hour’s MPVA each day to ensure they are healthy. But very few are managing this and recent figures show just 14% of boys and 8% of girls are doing so. And these levels of inactivity are increasingly worrying for children’s long-term health and wellbeing. During a playing out session MVPA is the energetic play we often see; the skipping, scooting, hopscotch and playing tag as you would expect. But it’s brisk walking and similar types of activity as well and lots of imaginative games would include periods of MVPA as I’ve observed on my own street when make believe wizards and witches take to their broomsticks after huddling over a pretend cauldron for a while. The University of Bristol data shows;

Children are three to five times more active outdoors than indoors
Time spent outdoors with friends is linked to an increase in children’s physical activity levels
During playing out sessions children spent 30% of their time in moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and another 15% in light activity.
This compares to 5% of time indoors usually spent in MVPA

Angie Page introduced some important questions in presenting these findings. First was the notion of ‘subsitutional replacement’. Put in lay terms the issue is whether the children at the playing out session would have got their physical activity in another place such as their garden or local park if they hadn’t been playing in the street that day. The clear answer was no. The responses from parents and children showed that the playing out session was usually an alternative to a less active option – watching TV or another sedentary indoor activity.

And the other intriguing question was around the idea of ‘compensation’. This is the question of whether being active during a playing out session means children flop on the sofa for longer afterwards and are ironically less active than they would have been normally (as many adults often are after a gym session!). Again the data showed that this did not happen to the children playing out and that they did not have a pattern of doing less activity after playing out to ‘compensate’ for the more vigorous play they had done.

Professor Kevin Fenton, Director of Health and Wellbeing at Public Health England closed the conference by starkly stressing the urgency of improving children’s levels of physical activity and the need to make active play the norm once more. “It’s often said that the environment is an important health service,” said Professor Fenton. And he talked about both green spaces and urban spaces like streets, needing to be seen in this way – as potentially health-giving spaces for those spending time in them. The challenge both for the audience gathered at the conference, and for policy-makers and public health commissioners, is to support the idea of street environments as a ‘health service’ and to act on the growing body of research and data which clearly shows the benefits of street play. The evidence is there – not that anyone who has watched a playing out session has ever doubted it.

A few days after the conference my street played out again and this time as I watched the pink-cheeked skippers, legs blurred as they jumped faster and faster it felt inspiring to realise that what they were doing – so naturally and with so much fun – is part of something increasingly important to researchers and policy makers. You can read more about the University of Bristol’s research findings here. If you want to know how to support street play in your street, or work for an organisation interested in finding out more do get in touch.

This piece was originally posted on the playing out blog.