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Good evening, everyone. It's lovely to see such a huge audience for this public lecture and well deserved for this speaker, I think.

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I'm Erin Serraj. I convened the Child Development and Learning Group, and most of you know the format of these seminars.

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The speaker speaks for about 40 minutes, up to an hour.

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Then we have some questions in this one. It's a question answer session,

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and then we go and talk to our friends about the topics that have been raised or make new friends and talk about the same topics.

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It's my pleasure to introduce Naomi Eisenstadt.

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She's an honorary research fellow in our department and has worked on a number of research projects with us,

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including the Children's Centre Evaluation and a number of others.

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You'll be able to tell from her accent that Naomi grew up in the States,

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but she tells me that her first job in the UK was as a nursery assistant in a Social Services Day nursery in Edinburgh.

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You've got to understand a little bit of early childhood education and care in Scotland to know what that work would entail.

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So she really worked on the frontline with children for almost a decade.

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I think this strongly rooted experience served her well when she became the first director of staff

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and was for seven years in charge of all early years provision and family policy for UK government.

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She then became director of the Social Exclusion Taskforce, and more recently, she's undertaken major work on poverty,

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including being being an adviser to the First Minister in Scotland on poverty.

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Naomi is also a senior fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the LSC,

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and today her talk is on a really important topic that we should all be concerned with poverty matters, family income, parenting and child outcomes.

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And there's a wonderful new book that she has produced with her colleague, Carrie Oppenheim.

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And I would thoroughly recommend it to you. So there are a few copies here.

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If at the end you want to peruse through it and have a quick look at a scholarship, that would be great.

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Naomi.

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When I walked in, there were no the seats were empty behind me, so it's nice to see everybody in, nice to see so many familiar faces, old friends.

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Part of the story, I think, is quite important in terms of being a nursery assistant.

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The reason I was a nursery assistant is because I wasn't.

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I didn't have the qualifications to be a nursery nurse and I was like, I did an early childhood qualification,

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a diploma in early childhood at University of California, which the UK government didn't recognise.

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And when I wrote to the UK government asking them, Could I work in a nursery school or could I work?

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They said no, that they didn't accept my degree. They didn't accept any of my qualifications, didn't accept anything.

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So I became a nursery assistant. And 15 years later, I was in charge of the entire system for early years for England.

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So I still have that letter. I think that letter is just wonderful in terms of in terms of what what England's like.

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I need to pay tribute to my colleague, my co-author who isn't here, Carrie Oppenheim, who was the child care adviser at 10.

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When I was doing Shaw start and policy press, asked me to write a book.

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I thought about what I wanted to write about and then I asked Carrie if she would write with me.

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And the reason I wanted to write the book is that the thing,

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one thing that the conservative government did that incensed me more than anything else

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is when they did away with the child poverty targets and when they did away with any,

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you know, the requirement for local authorities to have a child poverty strategy.

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And they also did away with they tried to do away with the requirement to report on child poverty.

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But the House of Lords overruled that, and those acts so incensed me in terms of the direction that the government was going in.

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I felt that it was important to tell the story. And of course, once Carrie came along, the story became much more,

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much less polemical and much more good on data because Carrie with Carrie was

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the academic in the team and I was the this is the argument I want to make.

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So let's see next. So this slide is I think we all will probably remember it from Axel Hiep Miller,

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who is in the strategy unit when he did a review for the government on family policy back in the Blair Brown days.

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He produced a slide that I think was actually brilliant explanation of.

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So what is the role of government? And it's important to say supporting parents and parenting,

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because parenting is a relatively new verb, and I'm going to say a bit more about that later.

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But is his view? Is it that if the government had two roles reducing pressures and enhancing capabilities?

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Reducing pressures is about maternity rights, about as support,

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in-kind access to maternity paternity leave, flexible working but also targeted benefits so support you.

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Reducing pressures is creating the condition where parents can parent and enhancing capabilities.

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Is government telling parents what to do? Is there a way that you should?

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You should treat your children? So let's see.

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There's a changing landscape. We looked at this work over the last two decades, starting in nineteen ninety seven and of course, the most.

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You know, you don't need to be a clever statistics person to know what the big dip dip is.

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That's a two thousand eight crash. But it's also, I mean, again, Carrie being being much fairer than I am.

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It's also important to note that the growth in GDP per head started before the Blair government,

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so Blair inherited a growing economy and therefore inherited an economy where you could invest a lot,

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both on the services side and on the benefit side.

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And of course, the crash changed all that and there was a recovery from the crash,

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but never really to the sort of results we got to in towards the end of the 90s, early 2000s.

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And that really colours what what both governments did.

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But also there's been essentially looking at these slides because we use the word landscape and you'll see why that's funny in a few minutes.

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But there's been a real change in the two decades over the types of families.

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So fewer opposite sex married couples, much more cohabiting couples,

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much more lone parent families and increasing numbers of gay and lesbian families and

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increasing number of blended families and blended families of these families where there's,

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you know, a couple gets together in a second relationship. Each may have children from prior relationships,

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and the arrangements on blended families can be incredibly complicated in terms of who sees which parents when what happens at Christmas.

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But I have to say that I'm I in a very successful blended family, and my example is quite sweet.

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I'm married the second time and my current husband's stepdaughter, his stepdaughter.

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From a previous relationship is a very successful novelist. Well, my first husband said I'm going to read various books out of family loyalty,

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and the idea that he called it family to me is just so wonderful, you know, and so blended families can work.

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He's a computer scientist, the surprising that he read one of her chick lit books, but he also really liked it.

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So that was really nice, too. So changing landscape, growing employment, I mean,

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one of the things that changed this very dramatically over the 20 years is we now

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the government is very proud that we have the highest unemployment figures ever.

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Mothers work much more and increasingly mothers with under-fives work and lone parents work much more.

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And certainly the lone parents working has contributed to reducing the number of lone parents in poverty.

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But still, lone parents are the most likely to be for mothers and couples.

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Families are actually a couple of families who are unmarried or more likely to be poor than married families.

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That may be about who decides to get married and who doesn't. But it's about what the risks of poverty are on the mothers with under-five.

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My son when he was five and I was working, said James, is really lucky.

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His mom is the dinner lady. So if your mother has to work, at least she gets to give you lunch anyway.

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Changing landscape. I mean, this is the most depressing of the slides about the data in work and still poor.

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One of the things that we saw during the Blair Brown years is that the way out of poverty was employment, and we had major employment programmes.

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We pushed very hard. The expansion of child care was about and was so that both families could work.

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But the idea that the majority of children who are who are poor now live in a

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family where at least one parent is in full time work is is quite shocking.

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Thank you. Thank you. So one of the reasons that there's been high increases in child poverty and working families is a reduction of tax credits.

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So we have much higher levels of in-work poverty than than we had.

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So employment alone does not get you out of poverty.

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If in fact, the minimum wage doesn't keep up, if in fact you don't have enough hours and also the way the employment figures are made,

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because if you're working two or three hours, you're still considered employed.

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So many people don't work enough hours or they have zero hours contracts.

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They're very insecure. But in-work poverty is is a is a key feature of many, many children's and families lives now.

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So this is why I thought the landscape was funny. So there's a wonderful book called The Gardener and the Carpenter.

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Alison got next book and she talks about parenting as we've gotten too much to think

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about parenting as the carpenter who can make the perfect piece of furniture.

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If you just work hard enough and have the right tools, the child will be fine,

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and she likes the metaphor of the garden, which is, you know, it may not all work out.

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You may get a few weeds. So my metaphor is slightly difficult.

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I was talking about, I think that the differences between an English garden rather chaotic and a French plot.

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And I think that what happens with an English garden is you get some surprises, but it works, really.

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It takes really hard work. My husband is very, very fond of the English garden,

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and I would say that he spends 20 hours a week making our garden look like no one ever touched it.

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Yeah, you know, and the pottery, of course you have no, you know, obviously, people work very, very hard to make it look look like that.

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But the important point about the metaphor is that no matter how hard you try, you can't predict everything.

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And that children have to be themselves. But it is our responsibility to create the conditions, and that's what the English garden is.

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It's creating the conditions. And then you you hope for the best.

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So what do children need? We focussed in the book on children's, cognitive, social and emotional development,

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the relationship within families with resources, income, education, occupation class and child outcomes.

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But also the inequalities in development that developed very early in early childhood.

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That early childhood does matter. But that early it doesn't all end at five.

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Basically, brain development continues well into adolescence. I really I worry about the sort of movements that say it's all over by five.

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First of all, because never too early, never too late, but in policy terms, it's quite dangerous.

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We don't give up on children. And we know from, you know, from the continued into ABC that, yes, a good start is really, really important.

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But you get much more fade if you don't have a good primary school and you get much more fade if you don't have a good secondary school.

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So each phase of childhood and adolescence has key milestones,

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risks and opportunities and is Leon's work from many years ago showed how children go in and out of risk.

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So it's not. It's not it's not a singular thing.

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It's kind of like the garden and maybe it's going to rain some summers and not other summers, and you'll have some dry periods.

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But by and large, children need, they need what they really need is money.

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And I know that the English right that we always talk about income resources,

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which we always use funny words, except because I'm American, I use the word money and income.

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Poverty does matter. And the brilliant work done by Chris Cooper proves that income actually matters independently of other factors in terms of.

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And in fact, Pam Salmon's work on EPI also found this that to be able to take your children to

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museums costs money to be able to take your children on foreign holidays costs money.

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All these things matter in terms of educational outcomes. All these things matter.

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But it also matters indirectly because low income increases stress.

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So I would like anybody in this room who has never had a fight with a partner about money to raise their hand.

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So, oh, good. Well done. There's one, but most people have money, stress, lack of money causes stress.

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And of course, the you know, the less money there is, the more stress there is and the more difficulty there is.

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So parents do matter virtually, you know, as much as money,

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a good homing learning home learning environment is associated with good child outcomes, regardless of of educational class.

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But money matters and home learning environment matters.

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And that's why reducing pressures and increasing capabilities are both important.

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Parents, especially mothers educational background makes a big difference.

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But of course, that's that's the sort of fixed characteristic. You can't change the legislation background when the child is born.

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You can increase the size of education, but in terms of how the data works.

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But relationships matter not only parent to child, but between the parents.

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And again, that's related to stress in families. So what is government done?

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And this is a kind of, well, you can see from the colours.

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And the you know, the big thing about labour, it was between the sort of bottom two bullets tax credits, minimum wage, child poverty targets.

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There was a mix of income transfers and service delivery.

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There was a mix of policies that were designed to increase capabilities,

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policies that were designed to put money into families hands and also policies that were designed directly for the child.

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So things like connexion aimed at young people, things like child care and early education,

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child care and early education had the two was directly for the child, but it was also for mothers employment.

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And I would argue and we argue in the book that in fact,

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the Labour's investment in child care was so skewed towards employment that

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it was skewed towards flexibility and affordability and not towards quality.

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So some of the disappointments we've had in not getting the kind of outcomes we'd hoped to get

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from the big investment in early childhood could be because we just didn't make it good enough.

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But we made it flexible. And I have a sort of again, a story when I was when I was still a civil servant working for Beverly Hughes,

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and I was trying to make things a little less flexible so that children got a regular dose of good early childhood education.

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And I said, Well,

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what if the is working part time at Tesco's and wants to work from three to six pm five days a week and get there 15 hours free in that way?

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And I said, Well, do you think that's so? So there was a young I actually I know I still know this man, but I won't mention his name.

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But a young political adviser, we call them Spads.

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And I reckon the last time he was in nursery was when he was in nursery, and he asked me if three year olds learn less well between three and six p.m.

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And I said nobody would be stupid enough to do the research because any nursery I've been in at 4:30 p.m., we're washing the paint pots.

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The staff were tired. You know, the children are either watching TV or outside playing.

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The staff retired.

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The child is not going to get the same cognitive developmental experience at six to at three to six that they would get from nine to 12.

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But nobody's done. I can't claim that as research evidence.

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I would claim that in terms of every nursery I've ever been in and knowing one or two three year olds.

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But that issue about flexibility flexibility is really important for employment purposes.

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I'm not sure it generates the best outcomes for the poorest kids in terms of early education.

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I think this department would have a lot of a lot of commitment to that. The coalition was very good on improving flexibility of leave.

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They built a lot on the labour reforms. They brought in the pupil premium and through the work of after the Education Endowment Fund,

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some of the pupil premium saying stuff is beginning to have some impact.

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They brought in trouble while they didn't bring it.

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They built on what was a labour programme called Family Intervention Projects and greatly increased it.

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The Troubled Families Programme, which again in for a very long time, wasn't showing any results at all.

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But lately it's looking like it does have some, some good impact.

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I keep looking at women and getting really nervous.

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But anyway, they set up the Early Intervention Foundation, but the all and they set up the Education Endowment Fund.

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Interestingly enough, the Early Intervention Foundation got what two million to start with.

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The Education Endowment Fund got two hundred million to start with.

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So their clear priority was about schools. It wasn't about wider child welfare.

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And of course, they started developing Universal Credit and a very, very harsh system of austerity.

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And what we argue in the book is that although most of the press reports and

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most of you would be involved in the kind of work that's about service cuts,

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the big cuts in austerity have been in benefits, massive benefit cuts and the massive benefit cuts have been largely felt by children and families.

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The Conservatives went up to 30 hours free, so again, expansion of childcare so that mothers could work.

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They said if at work what works centre and children's social care, they've invested somewhat in CAMHS and relationship support again.

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They were. The Conservatives were very clear on marriage matters.

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They put in a benefit for married people. It's not a lot of money.

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It's not enough money, I think, to make people get married. But they wanted to recognise that marriage work.

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And actually, Cameron was quite, I thought, quite sweet because he his his support for gay marriage was about his support for marriage.

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And I think for a conservative with that, I mean, it was part of the these conservatives are different from the old conservatives.

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So the support for gay marriage was an interesting part of support and relationship support.

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And their focus was on workless families and the impact on child outcomes.

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And I'll say more about that in a minute. But they continued Universal Credit and they continued austerity.

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And I mean, Universal Credit. Again, I would say, I think the basic principles were right.

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I think those things that they were trying to fix were correct. I think the old system was too complicated.

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It was too difficult to to wade through.

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But I think what they fail to recognise is that there's a fundamental tension in that if you families are really complicated.

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So if you want a system that's sensitive and responsive to how complicated families are.

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People move in and out of work. They move in and out of relationships. They have another child or a child, leaves home, grows up and leaves home.

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So the complications of family have to be dealt with by the benefits system.

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The Universal Credit system was meant to reduce those complications, which was a good idea because they got so complicated.

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Nobody knew how to get the benefits they were entitled to. But the more you try to take away the complications, the more rigid you make.

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The system and a rigid system can't be responsive to those differences in families.

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So I think that dilemma between how complicated families are and how a system that is complicated is too hard to manage.

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But a system that is rigid doesn't take account of those complications is basically a fundamental tension to be managed in the system.

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So what are the key features of of the of the two?

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Well, I think labour was I mean, I would say because, as you know, as a senior civil servant in the government, but I still defend.

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I don't defend everything we did, but I defend a lot of what we did. Reducing pressures and increasing capabilities.

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But the benefits of a growing economy, the benefits of money to spend and that, you know,

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you cannot underestimate the difference that made in terms of the ability to try new things,

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the ability to really invest and to really and I think in many cases,

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probably not enough investment in evaluation as well certainly ensures that there was a massive investment in valuations in children's centres,

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less so because then it was a coalition.

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But the investment, I think, you know, I think we're really important under the Coalition and the Conservatives,

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they really did want to increase capabilities.

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It wasn't just cynical, they really did think families matter, but they their key issue was about the deficit and and reduce reducing the deficit.

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So there. So austerity trumped the issues about increasing family poverty.

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Well, what's interesting also about the Conservatives is that the Conservatives manifesto

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in 1997 actually said we want to minimise unnecessary interference in family life.

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In 1997, they were still worried about the nanny state.

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And I think what really distinguishes Cameron and then onwards is that all of a sudden governments don't worry about the nanny state anymore.

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I wish they'd worry about it a bit more, actually, because I don't think they always know what's the best thing for families.

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But there is a conservative ex secretary of State for Education talks about social mobility.

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We have to care about the home learning environment because it's going to determine the futures of a lot of those children.

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So we began to switch from child poverty to social mobility, and it's quite different because social mobility is saying, well, everybody has a chance.

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If you level the playing field, then it'll all be OK because the cream will rise to the top.

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So again, I have I have another story from my experience about how, in my view,

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it's impossible to level the playing field and no country in the world has done it.

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Other countries have less of a steep slope than we have.

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They have less inequality than we have, and the difference between the richest and the poorest is less than we have.

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But nobody has actually levelled the playing field.

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So when I worked in Milton Keynes and a nursery in the early 80s, we did a lot of work on gender apologies.

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Those of you have heard this story, but we did a lot of work on gender.

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And one of the mothers said to me that she thought it was really, really important because maybe when Darren, who was then four years old,

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grew up, he wouldn't have a job and maybe his wife would have a job, and she didn't want him to feel bad about not working.

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So this mother's response to growing unemployment amongst white working class men was.

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Find a rich wife. It wasn't work hard at school. It wasn't what it was fine.

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So but she was a loving mother. She wasn't an abusive mother.

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This was not a family about the whole. This was a loving mother responding to the environment around her.

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And again, I roll forward 12 or 15, however many years it is.

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And when I was a senior civil servant in the Department of Education, a colleague of mine was taking his daughter for her Cambridge interview.

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And in the car on the way he would tell her what questions would be like and who would be.

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Because he went to Cambridge. Now, he's not corrupt.

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He is using what he has to benefit his child.

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And that's what we all do. And that's why we can't level the playing field because people like us will always crowd the top.

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And people like me will get the winter fuel allowance.

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So a lot of the benefits that were lost to families and children were maintained for older people.

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So the system is skewed, but how you level the playing field between that kind of social capital?

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I mean, so I think it creates, you know, the story of social mobility,

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I think has some very serious flaws in it in terms of what what it's possible to do.

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So we've got different views on the causes and measuring high risk of poverty and disadvantage in the social exclusion force.

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We did look at family income, we looked at housing, we look at mothers mental health.

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So we looked at a whole range of family disadvantages which were most likely to have the the most, the strongest features in terms of poor outcomes.

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And we found that it was money, plus it was money plus poor housing money plus mothers mental health problems.

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But that money did matter and it was almost I mean, when we did the work in social exclusion,

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I said at the end of the day, two things matter for good outcomes and actually they matter for all of us love and money.

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And, you know, essential but not sufficient because relationships matter.

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But also family income matters, and the love does, does matter.

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And to make things happen in government, it's also love and money because if the ministries have the budgets, they'll be able to do something.

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But if they don't like each other, they won't work together to do it.

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So the love and money works at every single level, so when we did social exclusion and you had to work across government departments,

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those we were always working with middle ranking or junior ministers, we weren't working at secretary of state level.

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These middle ranking and junior ministers were always wanting to get a seat at the cabinet.

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You don't get a seat at the cabinet by giving credit to somebody in another department.

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You get it by claiming the credit yourself if they were friends, as, of course,

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in politics, many people saw and knew each other the years they would work together.

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If they didn't like each other, they wouldn't work together.

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So even if they had the money, if they didn't have the love, you wouldn't get the kind of policy development that you needed across government.

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DWP did a major piece of work, but just don't work with families.

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So they were working with the most disadvantaged families and then found things like family breakdown, problem debt, substance misuse.

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So the DWP, you know, disadvantages weren't about money, they were all about behaviours.

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And again, that's a very, very important change. They were about what people do, and if only they wouldn't drink too much,

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if only they wouldn't get divorced, if only they would, then it would all be OK.

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Adverse childhood experiences were retrospective. How do you predict?

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Well, based on what happened to you as a child,

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would you be able to be a good parent and then the children's commissioner and you're going to have a presentation on it in about three weeks?

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Did a lot of work on vulnerability measures? So I think what happened over the years in terms of money began to fall out of the disadvantage story,

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and it became a mix of behavioural problems and a greater emphasis on how parents behaved.

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So if only parents would do the right thing, if only they would provide the good family learning environment,

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then everything would be OK without taking into account that it was much harder to do the right thing if you're worried about the electric bill.

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So some policies do work. There is consistent evidence on the benefits of high quality early education,

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I don't know why we have to keep proving it because we've been pooling it for about thirty five, forty years.

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But there is good evidence. There's good evidence that actually over the twenty years, mothers and fathers spend more time with their children.

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But interestingly enough, mothers of course, still spend much more time than fathers do, but fathers spend more than they did 20 years ago.

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Mothers spend more than they did 20 years ago, even though they're working more.

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But the social the gap in socioeconomic status on time with children remains and actually widened.

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Educational gap is narrowing, but very slowly. And some early intervention programmes do work.

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But the difficulty with the programmes that work is replication, so they work in one area because people are encouraged.

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Increasing it really dedicated. They really want to do it.

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They're interested in doing it with fidelity. And then what happens as sort of middle manager from another authority comes and visits,

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and then he goes back and he says to his staff, Go, I saw this wonderful programme.

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I think you should do it. Why don't we buy the manual and the sort of frontline staff get the manual?

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And they're immediately the skilled.

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So, so the idea that you can just move one to the other is very, very difficult in terms of how frontline people feel about about implementation.

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The other problem with implementation is that just Whitehall doesn't understand about time.

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Whitehall thinks the minister thinks that the announcement is implementation,

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and the civil servant thinks it's posting the guidance tick, that's done.

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And the trouble is, civil servants, senior civil servants are super smart, which is a good thing.

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I'm glad that the people who make policy for us are really smart, but that means they bore really easily.

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And when they get bored, they want to move on to the next thing,

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and the minister wants to move on to the next thing because once the announcements made, there's no credit anymore.

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You know, when they always say, Oh well, they announce that six months ago, you get in trouble for it.

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Now, you get in trouble for persisting, you get in trouble for sticking with the policy.

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You know, you don't get the credit. It doesn't work. But the greatest story I have about the difficulty about implementation was my

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favourite piece of work that we did was the ten year childcare strategy in 2004.

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It brought together benefits changes, training changes, children changes in every know.

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It was a brilliant piece of work. And if you're a civil servant, there's nothing.

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It just can't get better than the prime minister and the chancellor being in competition for your policy.

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And that's what happened to me. Both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair wanted the policy, wanted the new work on early years,

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and so Gordon was going to announce it as part of the pre-budget report.

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And we were going to show number 11 there was going to be closed circuit TV.

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There might be some people in the room who were in the room that afternoon.

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So in number 11 Downing Street, we're going to have Gordon was going to announce it in parliament.

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We were going to show it on closed circuit TV and number 11. I had to check and make sure that they had lunch because I'm Jewish.

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I didn't want to invite all my friends to come to never live in Downing Street and not give them something to eat.

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So it was all the stakeholders were coming to number 11 and they rang my office

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at like 11 o'clock in the morning said they couldn't get the TV to work.

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Well, I'm good, but I'm not that good.

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And it turned out that the TV wasn't working because they had the wrong Ariel and the right arrow was in number 10 Downing Street,

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where Tony Blair lived. And they, the workmen in No10, refused to carry the Ariel down the corridor to number 11.

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Carrie Oppenheim, my co-author on the book, had to put it under her coat and take it down the corridor to number 11 Downing Street.

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That's how crazy these people were. Tensions to be managed.

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I mean, I've sort of set a lot of this under understanding a problem is not solving it.

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Implementation is harder than than design. I mean, one of the things that I used to say to my boss when I worked in the Department of Education,

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Tom Jeffrey, who is brilliant, is that just one more PowerPoint isn't going to do it?

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The analysis is useful, but it only gets you so far.

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You really have to figure out what are the barriers? Who are the resisters? How do you win hearts and minds?

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But we spend a lot of time on PowerPoint. Ed Miliband and PowerPoint.

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Actually, you'd have a 20, a 20 slide pack and you'd get to three.

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And with all the questions in an hour and a half. National local UK top down, bottom up.

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I think that's really hard because everybody believes in local democracy until it's their issue and then it's tell the [INAUDIBLE] what to do.

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So I believes in local democracy, but I didn't want to be where we were on early years in nineteen ninety seven,

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where it is up to local authorities to decide whether there was any early education

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and childcare at local level at all and where I live in nineteen ninety seven,

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there was one nursery school, only one. Yeah, so that big expansion was because government said do it and gave them the money to do it.

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So I suppose I'm much more authoritarian. You know, when it's my issue, I want it to be UK wide or at least England wide.

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But when it's anybody else's issue, I think you know what? Let it be local democracy.

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But it's a very complicated story about how much should be nationalised, how much and at what level.

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I'm targeting open access or universal. I think there's always a confusion about open access and universal.

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I think of Universal as an entitlement. NHS is a universal service.

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If you don't get a good service from the NHS, you can sue. You can go to judicial review.

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Open access is where you have some services, where they happen to be in an area, but anybody can use them.

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And I think the quality of children's centres and what the children's centres research found

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was that open access services were most likely to get these families on the cusp who hadn't,

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you know, they weren't severe enough to reach a targeted level, but with a little bit of help,

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a little bit of support, and they tend to be non stigmatising.

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So I'm a great fan of open access services and behavioural interventions or systems reform.

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Well, obviously it's both. Where next?

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Well, I think we have to reduce child poverty and grow capabilities.

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That's what the book is about. I don't think government has set out what key entitlements are.

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I don't care whether we call it sure start or whatever we call it.

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We always have new names because that's the announcement. But what?

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What is every child family individual? What can they expect from the state?

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And I don't think we have a clear notion about that, a public health approach, which is about prevention, early intervention and tailored responses.

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It's about the continuum and it's about how do you shift the curve, not just work with the tail, not just work with the severely disadvantage.

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How do you reduce the flow into severely disadvantaged and try to get the curve moving the other way, flipping people over?

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This is where I think open access services can do is get to people before they're at that very,

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very severe rate and the flexibility to respond to the dynamic nature of family life over the life life course.

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So this is my last slide, is it?

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Yeah, right? OK, so we need to find the right balance.

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You can read the slide. But I just think one of the things that Carrie and I missed out in the book that I feel really bad about that's

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missing is we spend so much time about the difficulties we stop and mind ourselves about the joy of being a child.

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You know, we're not raising a four year old, so they can be good readers at eight, a four year old should enjoy being a four year old.

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It's nice if they can be good.

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But I just think that we don't think enough about the joy of childhood itself and about children are entitled to a joyful childhood and that parents,

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you know, because I had my my son rather late and because I'd worked in nurseries for years, I was completely surprised about how wonderful it was.

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I was completely prepared for it being terrible and sleepless nights and all the horrible stuff I'd work with mothers.

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Years before I had a baby, I was completely unprepared for how wonderful it is.

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My son is almost thirty eight. It's still wonderful. Yeah. So I think we have almost taken the joy out of being a mother, a father.

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And again, I'd like to say mother and father.

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I find that when we talk about parents, it's almost always women that we're talking about the joy of being a mother or father.

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So I'll finish with again, a family story that I think is about the joy of being part of its joyful part of.

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It's pretty scary. When I was working in the Department for Education, I got a text from my son.

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This is a while ago because he was at the G8 summit in Scotland and he was arrested and the text was arrested.

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Now arrested out and arrested yesterday out now behaving responsibly.

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Thank you very much. Then I met so many years later, I met somebody who is the other side of the fence and he was chained to.

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But anyway, so that weekend, when he came home after this out of jail,

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he he met up with a friend who he had known at school, who had left school at 14 because he was bullied.

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So Dan left school at 14 now, had a job, was in a relationship.

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And yeah, but you know, I'd had a tough life leaving school at 14 and I was sitting chatting to them both.

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And I said to Dan, So did you go to the.

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Did you did you go to the summit in Scotland? And he looked me straight in the eye and said, I'm much too poor to be an anti-capitalist.

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Thank you very much.