Happy talk - behind the UK's 'dismal record' for children

A few years ago, a report appeared from UNICEF which claimed that Britain was the worst possible place for children to live: the whole thing was lapped up gleefully by everyone from the Daily Mail (as a stick to beat Labour) to Polly Toynbee (in her crusade for more cash for early years). Now a 'new' report for the Child Poverty Action Group - surprise, surprise - says pretty much the same thing and is being given top billing on Today and in the Mail. Today's Mail said that the CPAG research 'echoed' the UNICEF report. Well, it would do, wouldn't it, since the principal author of both reports is Professor Jonathan Bradshaw of the Social Policy Research Unit at York University who decides which criteria to use in drawing up the league tables.

Now, having read some of his work, I think Professor Bradshaw is pretty good at his job. He can write reasonably well aside from occasional lapses into jargon - which can't always be said for academics - and has developed a perfectly reasonable theory about how to measure relative childhood happiness and quality of life across countries. But it is just that: a theory. Yet it is being treated as irrefutable fact despite his league tables (as with the UNICEF report) giving equal weight to different things that few would regard as of equal importance or reliability. The CPAG report doesn't tell you anything about Professor Bradshaw's weighting of different aspects; in order to understand why the UK does so badly, one has to understand his weighting. To do that you need to fork out $34 for an article he wrote with Dominic Richardson of the OECD (in an independent capacity) in a journal called Child Indicators Research, published earlier this month.

The research splits 43 indicators into 19 components across 7 domains, giving each domain equal weight. There, you find, for example, that the reason the UK does poorly on child health is because of its relatively low childhood immunisation rates. These are given equal weight to infant mortality and to something called 'health behaviour' based on questions to children about whether they brush their teeth, are too fat or eat apples. The UK is apparently doing fairly well on these latter scores, but has been downgraded by its low immunisation rates. I wonder which newspaper and which morning current affairs programme has most to answer for on that score?

Then, there's something called "subjective wellbeing" - which is ranked as importantly as health or education. This has three components - each one three times as important to a country's score as whether kids can read properly. These are "personal wellbeing - the percentage of children reporting high life satisfaction" - whatever that means; wellbeing at school - whether children "feel pressure at school" (bad, apparently) or "like school a lot" (good); and 'self-defined health" - whether children think they are healthy. Each of these three subjective components is ranked more importantly than whether a country's babies die in infancy. Anyway, needless to say, British kids score below average on this lot. But it is comforting to learn that in league table-free Finland, regarded as the best education system by many, children feel just as much pressure and are just as likely not to like school as their British counterparts. The authors tell us this is because "educational attainment may be a well-becoming indicator rather than a well-being indicator." I did warn you Prof Bradshaw was guilty of occasional lapses into jargon.

Next up is relationships. There are just two components here, each worth considerably more to a country's ranking than good literacy or low infant mortality. And as Britain is slightly above average here, we probably shouldn't complain. But it is again subjective and is based on the percentage of children who "find it easy to talk to" their parents and who find their classmates "kind and helpful." In case you were wondering, France is not a good place for this sort of thing. I trust President Sarkozy has a taskforce on the case already.

Then we turn to material wellbeing, which is based on relative poverty indices, measures of deprivation and children in workless households. This seems, like health, to be a reasonably objective indicator. Children in the UK are, apparently, among the most likely to be living in workless households, but the authors tell us this does not mean they are lacking in consumer durables (colour TVs, computers or cars) or under severe economic strain. The next 'domain' is risk and safety. The three components here are 'violence and violent behaviour' (fighting or experiencing bullying), child deaths and risky behaviour (early intercourse, smoking, drugs, drunkenness). Surprisingly, perhaps, the UK does a bit better on this list, being brought down by youthful drunkenness, but having a relatively low number of child deaths.

Then we turn to education. The UK gained slightly above average PISA scores (among the countries in this report) in literacy, numeracy and science (though the combination of these is only worth the same as each of the subjective questions above). The other two components are educational participation of 15-19 year-olds and in pre-school and NEET rates (those not in work, education or training). Since there is an obvious correlation between post-16 participation and NEETs, the authors have chosen to give half of the education score to this aspect of education. There is no mention of university participation, where the UK does well. And the relatively high pre-school participation rates, where the UK is also doing much better than many - and which most researchers would regard as the most crucial element - are apparently worth just a third as much as 16-19 participation/NEETs. That is the authors' choice but this is not an accurate representation of any education system. There is a final domain for housing issues, which is a second poverty grouping.

In their academic article, the authors themselves show how easy it is to manipulate the data - and, to be fair, are happy to offer it to anyone else wanting to do so. They pick just seven indicators - child immunisation, 'high life satisfaction', talking to dads, lack of educational possessions, recent bullying, maths scores and houses with housing problems and the UK finds itself up in 18th position instead of 24th, ahead now of France and Italy.

I have no quibble with researchers reporting these indicators and highlighting where Britain ranks according to each one of them. I also think it is important that young people's voices are heard - as is increasingly the case in schools. But I worry about arbitrary weightings which give far more weight to subjective - and perhaps culturally sensitive - questions than to matters of life and death or pretty basic educational outcomes. The CPAG should publish all this information on its website, but if the media weren't so keen on talking our country down, they might actually explain the arbitary nature of these rankings - and own up where our low rankings reflected their own efforts rather than the policies of the government.

This post has been picked up by John Rentoul.

A mixture of sentimentality and panic?

What would be a good way of describing a report on children which reckoned that kids today were worse off than in the days when they were 'seen and not heard', or when child labour was rife; one that sought to insulate youngsters from the world into which they were likely to become adults by not testing them or publishing the results?

The Archbishop of Canterbury, in a foreword to today's report from the Children's Society, puts it well: "a climate where the mixture of sentimentalism and panic makes discussion of children's issues so difficult." But he wasn't talking about this latest publication; he was apparently endorsing its tone and prescriptions.

To be fair, the report does have some good ideas. The idea of civil birth ceremonies is not a bad idea. Nor is the endorsement for better paid teachers in deprived areas. But the overall tone of the report's launch plays into a general idea that young people have never had it so bad and have never been so unhappy with their lot.

In explaining why they concluded that young people are allegedly so much more unhappy today, one of the report's authors, Richard Layard told the Today programme that it was because so many of them had 'psychiatric problems.' Hence the report's recommendation that we train 1000 more psychological therapists. But do they really? Or are we just relabelling lots of things that would previously have been treated as a normal part of growing up?

And, well done to the Children's minister Beverley Hughes, quoted in yesterday's Observer, for nailing the canard that testing is making youngsters unhappy.

Children needed some stresses and challenges to develop the necessary resilience for adult life, she said. "I think that largely the impact on children of doing tests can be mediated by parents and schools," she added."I have always felt that being tested is a part of life that you have to get used to and for a child you can make that something to be scared of or you can do it in a way that normalises it."

This blog has been picked up by the Teachers' TV website.

The curious case of the feral children

According to Barnardo's, over half of adults thought today's children were behaving like animals. And someone in the Barnardo's press office was occupied reading the comments on national newspaper blogs - I hope he or she got danger money - which led to this startling finding (as reported on the BBC website):

The charity also examined comments left on stories published on the websites of
several national newspapers. Staff found messages where children were described
as "feral" and some suggestions teenagers should be "shot".

It was all linked to an advertising drive against the demonisation of children. The whole campaign strikes me as a pretty desperate exercise. There may well be demonisation of young people - that's hardly new. But to suggest that half of adults think children are animals sounded absurd. Now it is clear that is a bit of a stretch, to put it politely.

I don't often find Civitas terribly persuasive with their bizarre opposition to public sector accountability, but they have shown in a press release today how the questions that led to these conclusions were pretty loaded and unclear.

there were six questions. The one that produced the strongest majority view was not reported in the press release. It asked: 'Nowadays it feels like the streets are infested with children'. 60% disagreed, but the [Barnardo's] press release does not report this clear majority view. Instead it reported that 35% agreed with the statement.

....The report also took advantage of the ambiguity of the term 'feral'. The poll asked respondents if they agreed with the statement 'People refer to children as feral but I don't think they behave this way' and 45% disagreed (42% agreed) The term 'feral' usually refers to occasions when a previously domesticated animal has gone wild, as in a 'feral cat'. The emphasis is on going wild and that is what most people would have understood by the term when asked. They thought they were agreeing with a statement that some children have 'gone wild', a way of saying that they are not sufficiently under the control of their parents or teachers. It is not the same as claiming that children are animals.

And isn't there also a bigger problem in the way that society simultaneously mollycoddles teenagers by not letting them do anything for themselves that involves responsibility but refuses to set sensible boundaries of behaviour? Wouldn't a campaign to encourage adults to give young people more responsibility while expecting better behaviour in return, do more for their welfare than an amateur horror flick?

Child's play

I have some sympathy with the authors of the latest letter to the Telegraph from children's experts when they complain that an ultra-cautious society has made it too diffficult for children to play in parks or enclosed streets. But their assertion that children don't play enough because there is too much testing is too silly for words. Before the age of 14 there are two short sets of tests for all: one at seven has moved so far from being a serious national test as to be unrecognisable; those at eleven are the only independent measure we have of whether 11 year-olds - not five or six-year olds - can read, write and add up. Of course, children need more freedom to play. They also need the 3Rs if they aren't to spend the rest of their lives playing around.