When will Britain’s at-risk children finally be taken seriously – when they become big angry adults who can vote?
The charity Action for Children analysed recent official spending figures, finding that council budgets for early help services (to prevent families reaching crisis point) have shrunk by £743m in five years, amounting to more than a quarter of lost funds. Sure Start children’s centres have seen a £450m reduction in funding, with many councils choosing to save money by closing them altogether. It was also revealed that, while funding for England’s 73,000 children in care actually rose (10%), these children took half the national care budget, leaving what’s left to fund all the other children needing help in the country, resulting in many having to “fend for themselves”.
It comes to something for British children when being taken into care is some kind of dark bonus – at least in terms of funding. According to experts, underfunding early years services doesn’t even make good financial sense – in the long run. All too often, it leads to costlier, more complex interventions when situations do eventually reach crisis point. Then there’s the wider human cost – of the higher likelihood of damaged children struggling without monitoring or help, falling out of education, into druggy and/or criminal circles and generally lacking the skills to build happy and productive lives.
After all, disturbed, angry, marginalised kids have a nasty habit of turning into disturbed, angry, marginalised adults – or is this too much of a long-term view for politicians and councils to contemplate?
It seems yet more grotesque when, these days, it’s become a standing joke how better-off children get absurdly mollycoddled throughout their upbringings, to the point where their parents practically end up following them to university, in case something awful happens, such as their Stormzy poster falling off the wall, their Pot Noodle being too hot to eat, their essay getting an A instead of an A-star, or whatever else might be considered a “major crisis” in more comfortable circles. Of course I’m being facetious, but many vulnerable young children aren’t even getting the basic help they desperately need, to the point where, echoing so much in modern Britain, there’s an entrenched two-tier child society that looks likely to get even worse.
Perhaps it serves us to remember that enterprises such as Sure Start, and other forms of early help, weren’t conceived as optional social or recreational opportunities – cute excuses to read some poorer kids bedtime stories, pass around beakers of orange squash or play some feelgood pat-a-cake. They were designed for big, grim, important reasons – to act as national safety nets for vulnerable children who desperately needed someone to look out for them.
Now that these safety nets are being systematically shredded by cynical, intentional government neglect, those children are doomed to keep falling through the giant funding holes long into adulthood.
• Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist
