This is a new project I am hoping to pursue. This is the proposal, which asks the question: how do we level up children’s mobility?
Children are growing up in poverty in the UK, with severely reduced life chances. Government figures indicate that in 2021-22, 3.3 million children, 23%, lived with absolute low income after housing costs (House of Commons Library, 2022). Using an analogous concept of destitution, understood as people having lacked two or more of shelter, food, heating, lighting, clothing, footwear or basic toiletries over the last month, research for the Joseph Rowntree Fund (JRF) found that over a million households including 2.4 million people were considered to be destitute during 2019, of whom 550,000 were children (JRF, 2020). According to these 2019 figures, the number of children living in destitution had increased by an extraordinary 52% compared with 2017 (JRF, 2020) and is expected to have increased even further post-pandemic (JRF, 2023).
Children are more likely to be living with income poverty than adults (House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee, 2021), facing financial constraints as well as material deprivation, where households are unable to access products or services, including energy and food. Children living in low-income households are exposed to nutritional deficiencies (O’Connell and Brannen, 2021) and possible lifelong health effects from growing up with fuel poverty (Marmot et al, 2022). Poverty can also limit access to greenspace, with consequences for play and wellbeing as well as access to nature, limiting wellbeing (PHE, 2020). One in eight British households has no garden, with the highest figure (21%) found in London, with Scotland (13%) also widely affected, while people of Black ethnicity are 2.4 times less likely than those of White ethnicity to have a private garden (Gov.uk, 2020). Natural England has found that three-quarters (73%) of children from households with a total annual income below £17,000 spent less time outdoors than children in households where the annual income was above £17,000 (57%) (Natural England, 2020).
Poverty impacts children’s spatial mobility, which can significantly affect their social mobility, although the connections between the two remain remarkably under-studied at policy level (though there is important work on transport and social exclusion see ODPM, 2003; Lucas, 2012 and on social mobility see Dunn, 2022). Constrained mobility affects education, limiting access to schools of choice, particularly secondary and post-16, as well as access to internships and work experience. Educational achievement (including ‘Attainment 8’ at GCSE) stands at 40% for ‘disadvantaged’ children, 15% below the mean average, while the ‘disadvantage index’ for Maths and English stood at 3.79 in 2020-21, where 1 would indicate parity, little changed from 2010 (Gov.uk, 2022). Limited or expensive public transport costs can limit children to their immediate locality, with consequences for active hobbies as well as for access to museums and other cultural institutions (Goodman et al, 2014; Layard et al, 2022). Children may find it difficult to acquire cultural capital, becoming less likely to ‘see it, to be it’, lacking clear pathways for talent and aspiration. Even at home, children may be unable to access online opportunities through digital exclusion due to high equipment, broadband and 3G prices. Research has found that 8% of UK children aged 5-15 do not have access to an internet- enabled desktop computer, laptop, or netbook at home, while 2% of school-aged children relied on smartphone-only internet access in order to get online (Boyer et al, 2021) All of these deprivations become even more acute if children experience complex needs or disabilities.
We also know that the geographies of poverty and destitution are closely related. At a regional scale, the highest average rates of destitution are found in the North East and North West (where 35% and 34% of children live in poverty after housing costs, respectively) (DWP statistics, produced in House of Commons Library, 2023). Children in the North East also have a greater rate of free school meal entitlement, at 29.1% compared with a national average of 22.5% and a rate of 17.6% in the South East of England (Gov.uk, 2022). At local authority scale, three parts of Birmingham have the highest child poverty rates, with high levels also found in Bradford and Glasgow (House of Commons Library, 2023). There are also ‘social mobility coldspots’ for individual wards within rural areas (including West Somerset and Norfolk) as well as within otherwise affluent cities including Oxford and Cambridge (Social Mobility Commission, 2017). Place affects children’s life chances.
Children’s Social Mobility:These findings raise the question: how can we level up children’s opportunities and life chances and what role does legal geographical research have to play? There is a broad consensus both that social mobility is desirable, particularly if framed as equality of opportunity, and that like poverty, social mobility is geographically variegated (Social Mobility Commission, 2017). Conventionally understood as change in relation to a person’s socio-economic situation, either in relation to their parents (inter-generational mobility) or throughout their lifetime (intra-generational mobility), social mobility in the UK rests on shaky foundations. The Social Mobility Commission’s reports often produce divergent assessments often dependent on different ideological perspectives on responsibility, including on the role of home and school (see e.g., Social Mobility (2017) and (2022)). The OECD’s conclusion that social mobility is: “so frozen that it would take five generations for a poorer family in the UK to reach the average income” (OCED 2018, 259) remains.
The governance framework for social mobility – connecting poverty and disadvantage with opportunity – has shifted significantly, moving from a focus on poverty under the 1997-2010 Labour governments, to ‘life chances’ under the early Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition government (who rebranded Labour’s 2010 Child Poverty Act as the ‘Life Chances Act’ (LCA 2010)), to ‘social mobility’ since 2012 and, more recently, to ‘levelling up’ under the current 2022-23 Levelling-Up and Regeneration Bill. Legislative obligations are limited since the Welfare Reform and Work Act (WRWA 2016) removed targets to reduce child poverty (originally LCA 2010 s1), the requirement for a national child poverty strategy (originally s9) and obligations on local authorities to co-operate to reduce and mitigate the effects of child poverty (originally s21). Instead, governments are now required to maintain statistics on worklessness and educational attainment (WRWA 2016, s9) as well as some data on children in low-income households, thanks to a Lords Amendment to the Bill (s4). The Equality Act 2010 offers limited protection to children, while s1, the public sector duty regarding socio-economic inequality, has still not been brought into force in England (unlike in Scotland and Wales). While the Levelling-Up Bill 2023 aims address spatial difference, it primarily focuses on devolution, planning and infrastructure rather than spatial inequality or social mobility, neither of which are mentioned in the legislation.
In The Bus Project, children in Bristol told us that many of their peers are not leaving the streets in their immediate locality other than for occasional school trips. Their days are spent in their neighbourhoods with little prospect for active hobbies or cultural enrichment. Older children often cannot afford to attend the post-16 college of their choice, sometimes limiting their option choices. As an eleven-year-old girl asked in the prompt to our research on buses in Bristol:
‘My family don’t own a car and the bus fares are so expensive. Lots of people can’t get into Bristol to experience everything in the city centre. Some children have never been into Bristol, yet they only live a few miles away. So, I want to ask you: how can children grow up and enjoy their cities if they can’t get around them? And is it fair that some children can’t do this at all?’ (Layard et al, 2022).Many children growing up in poverty have never been to a beach, a wildlife reserve or visited a university, despite many impressive outreach projects. These absences are rarely recorded and are lacking from the conventional evidence base.
While the UK has ratified the Children’s Rights Convention 1989, the Treaty has not been implemented so that the Convention’s children’s rights have no explicit domestic legal effect (per Lord Reed, President of the Supreme Court in R v SC, CB and 8 Children, [91])), even despite the Treaty’s international obligations and discursive power. While there is excellent legal work on many aspects of children’s rights in medical, family, education, disability law and criminal justice (including Broach and Clements, 2020; Stalford et al, 2017; Jones and Welch, 2018, Hollingsworth, 2017), there is much legal and policy work still to be done on children’s rights if the Convention’s promise is to be realised, not least in explicitly linking rights to social mobility. This feeds into legal geographic questions. For instance, the CRC 1989 includes a Right to Play (Art. 31) yet children need spaces to play in, ideally in greenspace or with playground equipment within a reasonable distance from home (Lott, 2020), preferably also with access to clean air and nature. While greenspace and ecological assessments are largely qualitative, they can also be quantified, allocating a square meterage per person, including children. While there are hints of such an approach in Natural England’s 2023 Greenspace Infrastructure Standards, the strategy lacks any explicit focus on children or low income (which affects access to a car enabling people to drive to greenspace). To implement provision to play we need to understand both the children’s rights framework as well as the law and practice on property and greenspaces, identifying how meaningful implementation might occur.
Many pieces must fall into place to achieve improved social mobility. We need to evaluate legal and spatial mechanisms to consider how children’s life chances could be advanced, reflecting on the legal form reforms might take. For example, the child poverty target contained in the 2010 Act, abolished in 2016, could have underpinned a governance framework and discourse for child poverty (as the analogous net zero target has (partially) achieved under the Climate Change Act 2008). Even maintaining a national poverty strategy, still required by devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, can require or facilitate assessments against core aims. The choice of governance architecture and the mechanisms with in it are important.
One of the benefits of a clear legal system is that it provides stability and can be relied upon. Targets, strategies, duties, rights, discretion and free school meal entitlement are some of the legal mechanisms available. Yet some concepts are more powerful than others. Entitlements, for instance, can be relied on in a way that discretionary allocations as the 2011 transition from the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) to 16-19 Bursaries in England illustrates. Children in low-income households could (from 2004) rely on the EMA payment, knowing that this would pay for travel fares or college costs, grants are now only available through individual institutions, which may prioritise some recipients, for instance, care leavers. While such decisions are undoubtedly justifiable, this leaves 15–16-year-olds seeking to continue their education uncertain about whether they will receive financial assistance, limiting their choices in practice. Given the links between educational attainment and social mobility, as well as the limited offering of post-16 choices in less affluent areas, there is clear link between EMA and post-16 qualifications. Whilst the English experience is currently being assessed on economic terms (Brittan and Waltmann, 2022), we have little information on the spatial consequences of this change from an entitlement to a hope for a discretionary allocation. This raises questions about how laws could be crafted to support educational attainment, considering both geographic and income variation. This objective will also consider spatial strategies, including prioritising areas of deprivation, places with limited public transport links and regions with reduced opportunity for work experience. For instance, in the context of children’s social mobility, the ‘digital divide’ exists in part due to a lack of any legal requirement to provide online connection to children. A spatial strategy could provide free broadband access by postcode or through e-hubs located in local primary schools out of hours, subject to consideration of health and safety and insurance.
External References
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