Severe Deprivation and the Difficulties of Counteracting it.
By Jonathan Walker on September 10, 2009
I was pleased to notice today that Lesley Ward is now the President of the teaching union, ATL (Association of Teachers and Lecturers) - she was actually one of primary school teachers back in the glory days of Year 5, and I congratulate her on her new position.
Speaking at the President’s reception yesterday night in London, she raised the important issue of the difficulty of educating children who have the worst possible starting points (see 1 below).
There are perfectly healthy children who enter school not yet toilet-trained. Children who cannot dress themselves, children who only know how to eat with a spoon, and have never sat around a table to enjoy a home-cooked family meal. Children who don’t know who will be at home when they get home - if anyone. Children who don’t know who the father figure is in the home from month to month.
The life that many children are used to in the home is today very unstable, and it is this instability that teachers are being forced to contend with nationwide. Although she mentions the cultural deprivation of the poorest children, she is not implicitly blaming the parents, and attacks the ‘very ignorant stereotyping of why families live in poverty’ - the blame lies with the poverty that afflicts parents and children alike. The reality is that six in ten poor children live in families where someone works. “That’s shocking isn’t it - you go out to work, perhaps two or even three part-time jobs, and you are still living below the poverty line.
Newly released government figures (see 2 below) show that 2.9 million children lived in poverty in 2006-2007, down from 3.4 million in 1998-1999. This falls well short of Labour’s bold claim to eradicate child poverty by 2020, and it’s target to have halved the 1998 figure by next year - it is highly unlikely either of these targets will be reached. The media coverage of Lesley Ward’s statement has emphasised her use of the word ‘Dickensian’, which might be something of an exagerration, but the statistics are nonetheless highly condemning. Her conclusion is that “the best answer to better achievement is to get rid of poverty of all kinds for all children - financial, aspirational and emotional.” This is obviously true, and she is correct to emphasise the underlying role that poverty and inequality play in shaping a child’s education and their future.
For teachers who work in schools in deprived areas, where many children are eligible for free school meals and with a greater than average number on the ‘at risk’ register, educating the children is an uphill struggle. As Ward states, ‘it can be next to impossible to counteract the effects of such deprivation’.
I can certainly vouch for this; thinking of my fellow 9 year old pupils when we were in Lesley Ward’s class, those children who were of the lowest ability are now the ‘Neets’ (Not in Education, Employment or Training), who hang about, still near the old primary school and remain in the same dire situation as when they entered the school. And this is not the fault of teachers, nor the pupils themselves - nor can you wholeheartedly blame the parents either.
Although I myself hold quite an idealistic view of the potential power of education to change people’s life directions, my head isn’t completely in the clouds, and I am in complete agreement that the deprivation of children entering schools in the poorest areas is so endemic that the goals of a teacher are, at times, nigh on impossible to achieve.
The children suffer, the teachers are powerless to change the situation, despite their great effort, and parents are becoming more and more unable, and some unwilling, to engage in their childrens education. So long as there are such deep pockets of deprivation, such a divide between rich and poor, this problem will persist. Which begs the question of why more is not being done to get rid of the poverty that is, after all, the root of this and numerous other social problems.
Originally published for PEDAGOGGLES - www.pedagoggles.blogspot.com, by Jonny Walker.
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1 - http://www.atl.org.uk/media-office/media-archive/Some-children-so-deprived-it-can-be-incredibly-hard-for-schools-to-counteract-the-impact.asp
2 - http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/jun/10/welfare.economy?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront
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