Hilariously, the top three Google Images results for "feral youths" all came from the nation's favourite right-wing newspaper...
Yet another report this morning highlights just how important the early years for children are…
Children from the poorest homes are almost a year behind middle class pupils in language skills by the time they start school, research suggests.
Labour’s immediate defence (not yet though) will be to say that it proves their SureStart programme is the right idea, and that the Tories want to scrap it, etc. etc: a message that is somewhat unclear, because some reports say the Tories won’t scrap it, while others say they will cut money from its budget.
But in this case, I’m not interested in the partisan hackery. We’ve had enough of that over the past few days regarding the issue of care for the elderly.
This time, the point is simple. Study after study is showing that the biggest “damage” is done to a child’s prospects before they even enter school. Indeed, the sceptics might argue that all school does is merely nurture a child’s abilities as they get older and turn them into what has essentially already been pre-determined for them by the facts of their early childhood.
A very depressing argument, but there has to be some element of truth to it. After all, why is it that bad schools tend to be in “bad” areas, with high levels of poverty, unemployment, and general deprivation? And that this just never seems to change, decade in, decade out?
Time and again, the evidence shows that early intervention is the only way we can tackle the long-term nature of the underachievement from the difficult estates of Britain.
Such a platitude is very easy to say, however, without defining what we mean by “intervention”. And that’s where it begins to get tricky.
Parenting classes are the solution offered by The Sutton Trust, the ones who sponsored this research. Only problem is that you’re broadly dealing with people who, let’s just say, aren’t the sharpest tools in the box in the first place. How much will they be able to absorb and actually put into practice?
More money spent on the right things might help, but in our short-termist mentality it’s just not doable, even though it would probably pay itself back in the long run.
So are we talking then about very aggressive intervention? Social workers and health visitors keeping a very close eye on the development of children? It doesn’t sound very liberal, does it? Where do we stop after that: will people be required to take an IQ test before they’re allowed to reproduce?
Nobody ever said democracy was easy.
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