Educate yo’self

The London Child Poverty Commission recently called for a government minister to be appointed, solely to battle the poverty which holds back London’s least advantaged children. Sounds odd – but I suppose that whilst we still elect MPs like Liam Fox, who think that poverty is “just boring,” eye-catching demands are a neccesity.

The Commission found that a genuinely shocking 41% of all children in London live below the poverty line, and set out a series of proposals for tackling the situation – some sensible, some less so.

The sting of poverty is felt especially sharply in London, where the high cost of living is often not met by the wages needed to support a family. With conspicous signs of massive wealth all around, it must be difficult for poor children to reconcile this with their own circumstances.

I don’t personally believe that we need to get hung too up on ‘relative poverty’. Though it might aid social cohesion to drag the rich down, elevating the poor into dignity should be the government’s sole aim. But that doesn’t mean that the attitudes which economic polarisation breeds don’t still rankle.

When it was found that contract cleaners worked for £5.20 an hour scrubbing the floors of parliament, many of the men and women whose shoes scuff the marble seem indifferent. Was Nick Harvey, for one, not embarrassed?

Talk of child poverty increasingly prompts the refrain that ‘child poverty’ does not exist, and this is true. Because children are totally dependent on the adults who look after them – and the problem is family poverty. Overwhelmingly, parents want what is best for their children, and would do anything in their power to hasten their exit them from the cycle of poverty. Generally, this means education.

Education is the most effective route out of poverty. But what can we do when all around we hear that local schools are failing? Last week, thousands of parents learned that their children don’t have places at schools of their choice . Many will end up going to schools where majority of children fail to achieve 5 A*-C grades GCSE – which means no A Levels – which means no degree – which means earnings on average 59% lower than those of graduates. Who wants that for their children?

So what option do these parents have? While the richer middle-classes can afford to opt out of the state system and send their offspring to private schools, most can’t. Are they faced with accepting poverty of ambition and potential achievement on behalf of their children?

They must do the only thing they can – and get involved. Middle-class children in struggling schools still perform very strongly in exams, because of their home background. And when parents get involved in the schools themselves, as governors and active members of the community, flagging schools are given a new vigour.

I can only imagine that it’s very difficult at the end of a long day to sit down with children, or take them to the library – when you really just want to crack open a bottle of lager. And it must be hard to find the time to attend PTA meetings. But it’s surely the best thing that parents can do to make sure that their own, and indeed their neighbours children, don’t inherit poverty.