Frank Field is only half right. A poor child's upbringing can reduce the opportunities they will have - but poverty itself closes too many doors to them

Frank Field

This week, half buried under a new deluge of Cablegate chatter, Frank Field published his review of poverty in the UK. At its heart is a recommendation to move funding gradually away from direct support to poor children, and towards education and support for parenting and care for the child’s first five years.

Field is right to say that parenting is key early in a child’s life, and that poor upbringing can lead to poor choices later in life. In my own (brief!) experience working with Special Educational Needs pupils, the biggest hurdle to helping them achieve more was the ‘why should I?‘ factor. It’s not easy to magic up this kind of aspiration in pupils if they didn’t get it from their parents early on. Another example was reading ability. Those with a reading age of less than 9yrs struggle even to understand the curriculum, let alone learn it. Again, it’s difficult to get a child to read, much less to love reading, if they never got it from their parents.

But Field is only half right. Giving poor children a good start in life is necessary, but it’s not enough to say that poverty comes from making poor choices. People living in poverty can find their choices rather limited.

In power, Labour did recognise that poverty itself – relative poverty itself – led to social exclusion. Take digital inclusion, as one example: in 2008, Gordon Brown announced that children who received free school meals would get a free laptop, so they would not be at a disadvantage compared to their peers. Or financial inclusion: the Government set up a national financial advice service after it was found that people on low incomes had little access to financial advice. (Turns out banks and IFAs tend to concentrate their efforts on wealthy people? Who knew.)

► Continue reading No, Frank, poverty isn’t just in the mind