Good evening, everyone. It's lovely to see such a huge audience for this public lecture and well deserved for this speaker, I think.
I'm Erin Serraj. I convened the Child Development and Learning Group, and most of you know the format of these seminars.
The speaker speaks for about 40 minutes, up to an hour.
Then we have some questions in this one. It's a question answer session,
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.
It's my pleasure to introduce Naomi Eisenstadt.
She's an honorary research fellow in our department and has worked on a number of research projects with us,
including the Children's Centre Evaluation and a number of others.
You'll be able to tell from her accent that Naomi grew up in the States,
but she tells me that her first job in the UK was as a nursery assistant in a Social Services Day nursery in Edinburgh.
You've got to understand a little bit of early childhood education and care in Scotland to know what that work would entail.
So she really worked on the frontline with children for almost a decade.
I think this strongly rooted experience served her well when she became the first director of staff
and was for seven years in charge of all early years provision and family policy for UK government.
She then became director of the Social Exclusion Taskforce, and more recently, she's undertaken major work on poverty,
including being being an adviser to the First Minister in Scotland on poverty.
Naomi is also a senior fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the LSC,
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.
And there's a wonderful new book that she has produced with her colleague, Carrie Oppenheim.
And I would thoroughly recommend it to you. So there are a few copies here.
If at the end you want to peruse through it and have a quick look at a scholarship, that would be great.
Naomi.
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.
Part of the story, I think, is quite important in terms of being a nursery assistant.
The reason I was a nursery assistant is because I wasn't.
I didn't have the qualifications to be a nursery nurse and I was like, I did an early childhood qualification,
a diploma in early childhood at University of California, which the UK government didn't recognise.
And when I wrote to the UK government asking them, Could I work in a nursery school or could I work?
They said no, that they didn't accept my degree. They didn't accept any of my qualifications, didn't accept anything.
So I became a nursery assistant. And 15 years later, I was in charge of the entire system for early years for England.
So I still have that letter. I think that letter is just wonderful in terms of in terms of what what England's like.
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.
When I was doing Shaw start and policy press, asked me to write a book.
I thought about what I wanted to write about and then I asked Carrie if she would write with me.
And the reason I wanted to write the book is that the thing,
one thing that the conservative government did that incensed me more than anything else
is when they did away with the child poverty targets and when they did away with any,
you know, the requirement for local authorities to have a child poverty strategy.
And they also did away with they tried to do away with the requirement to report on child poverty.
But the House of Lords overruled that, and those acts so incensed me in terms of the direction that the government was going in.
I felt that it was important to tell the story. And of course, once Carrie came along, the story became much more,
much less polemical and much more good on data because Carrie with Carrie was
the academic in the team and I was the this is the argument I want to make.
So let's see next. So this slide is I think we all will probably remember it from Axel Hiep Miller,
who is in the strategy unit when he did a review for the government on family policy back in the Blair Brown days.
He produced a slide that I think was actually brilliant explanation of.
So what is the role of government? And it's important to say supporting parents and parenting,
because parenting is a relatively new verb, and I'm going to say a bit more about that later.
But is his view? Is it that if the government had two roles reducing pressures and enhancing capabilities?
Reducing pressures is about maternity rights, about as support,
in-kind access to maternity paternity leave, flexible working but also targeted benefits so support you.
Reducing pressures is creating the condition where parents can parent and enhancing capabilities.
Is government telling parents what to do? Is there a way that you should?
You should treat your children? So let's see.
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.
You know, you don't need to be a clever statistics person to know what the big dip dip is.
That's a two thousand eight crash. But it's also, I mean, again, Carrie being being much fairer than I am.
It's also important to note that the growth in GDP per head started before the Blair government,
so Blair inherited a growing economy and therefore inherited an economy where you could invest a lot,
both on the services side and on the benefit side.
And of course, the crash changed all that and there was a recovery from the crash,
but never really to the sort of results we got to in towards the end of the 90s, early 2000s.
And that really colours what what both governments did.
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.
But there's been a real change in the two decades over the types of families.
So fewer opposite sex married couples, much more cohabiting couples,
much more lone parent families and increasing numbers of gay and lesbian families and
increasing number of blended families and blended families of these families where there's,
you know, a couple gets together in a second relationship. Each may have children from prior relationships,
and the arrangements on blended families can be incredibly complicated in terms of who sees which parents when what happens at Christmas.
But I have to say that I'm I in a very successful blended family, and my example is quite sweet.
I'm married the second time and my current husband's stepdaughter, his stepdaughter.
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,
and the idea that he called it family to me is just so wonderful, you know, and so blended families can work.
He's a computer scientist, the surprising that he read one of her chick lit books, but he also really liked it.
So that was really nice, too. So changing landscape, growing employment, I mean,
one of the things that changed this very dramatically over the 20 years is we now
the government is very proud that we have the highest unemployment figures ever.
Mothers work much more and increasingly mothers with under-fives work and lone parents work much more.
And certainly the lone parents working has contributed to reducing the number of lone parents in poverty.
But still, lone parents are the most likely to be for mothers and couples.
Families are actually a couple of families who are unmarried or more likely to be poor than married families.
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.
My son when he was five and I was working, said James, is really lucky.
His mom is the dinner lady. So if your mother has to work, at least she gets to give you lunch anyway.
Changing landscape. I mean, this is the most depressing of the slides about the data in work and still poor.
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.
We pushed very hard. The expansion of child care was about and was so that both families could work.
But the idea that the majority of children who are who are poor now live in a
family where at least one parent is in full time work is is quite shocking.
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.
So we have much higher levels of in-work poverty than than we had.
So employment alone does not get you out of poverty.
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,
because if you're working two or three hours, you're still considered employed.
So many people don't work enough hours or they have zero hours contracts.
They're very insecure. But in-work poverty is is a is a key feature of many, many children's and families lives now.
So this is why I thought the landscape was funny. So there's a wonderful book called The Gardener and the Carpenter.
Alison got next book and she talks about parenting as we've gotten too much to think
about parenting as the carpenter who can make the perfect piece of furniture.
If you just work hard enough and have the right tools, the child will be fine,
and she likes the metaphor of the garden, which is, you know, it may not all work out.
You may get a few weeds. So my metaphor is slightly difficult.
I was talking about, I think that the differences between an English garden rather chaotic and a French plot.
And I think that what happens with an English garden is you get some surprises, but it works, really.
It takes really hard work. My husband is very, very fond of the English garden,
and I would say that he spends 20 hours a week making our garden look like no one ever touched it.
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.
But the important point about the metaphor is that no matter how hard you try, you can't predict everything.
And that children have to be themselves. But it is our responsibility to create the conditions, and that's what the English garden is.
It's creating the conditions. And then you you hope for the best.
So what do children need? We focussed in the book on children's, cognitive, social and emotional development,
the relationship within families with resources, income, education, occupation class and child outcomes.
But also the inequalities in development that developed very early in early childhood.
That early childhood does matter. But that early it doesn't all end at five.
Basically, brain development continues well into adolescence. I really I worry about the sort of movements that say it's all over by five.
First of all, because never too early, never too late, but in policy terms, it's quite dangerous.
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.
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.
So each phase of childhood and adolescence has key milestones,
risks and opportunities and is Leon's work from many years ago showed how children go in and out of risk.
So it's not. It's not it's not a singular thing.
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.
But by and large, children need, they need what they really need is money.
And I know that the English right that we always talk about income resources,
which we always use funny words, except because I'm American, I use the word money and income.
Poverty does matter. And the brilliant work done by Chris Cooper proves that income actually matters independently of other factors in terms of.
And in fact, Pam Salmon's work on EPI also found this that to be able to take your children to
museums costs money to be able to take your children on foreign holidays costs money.
All these things matter in terms of educational outcomes. All these things matter.
But it also matters indirectly because low income increases stress.
So I would like anybody in this room who has never had a fight with a partner about money to raise their hand.
So, oh, good. Well done. There's one, but most people have money, stress, lack of money causes stress.
And of course, the you know, the less money there is, the more stress there is and the more difficulty there is.
So parents do matter virtually, you know, as much as money,
a good homing learning home learning environment is associated with good child outcomes, regardless of of educational class.
But money matters and home learning environment matters.
And that's why reducing pressures and increasing capabilities are both important.
Parents, especially mothers educational background makes a big difference.
But of course, that's that's the sort of fixed characteristic. You can't change the legislation background when the child is born.
You can increase the size of education, but in terms of how the data works.
But relationships matter not only parent to child, but between the parents.
And again, that's related to stress in families. So what is government done?
And this is a kind of, well, you can see from the colours.
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.
There was a mix of income transfers and service delivery.
There was a mix of policies that were designed to increase capabilities,
policies that were designed to put money into families hands and also policies that were designed directly for the child.
So things like connexion aimed at young people, things like child care and early education,
child care and early education had the two was directly for the child, but it was also for mothers employment.
And I would argue and we argue in the book that in fact,
the Labour's investment in child care was so skewed towards employment that
it was skewed towards flexibility and affordability and not towards quality.
So some of the disappointments we've had in not getting the kind of outcomes we'd hoped to get
from the big investment in early childhood could be because we just didn't make it good enough.
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,
and I was trying to make things a little less flexible so that children got a regular dose of good early childhood education.
And I said, Well,
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?
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.
But a young political adviser, we call them Spads.
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.
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.
The staff were tired. You know, the children are either watching TV or outside playing.
The staff retired.
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.
But nobody's done. I can't claim that as research evidence.
I would claim that in terms of every nursery I've ever been in and knowing one or two three year olds.
But that issue about flexibility flexibility is really important for employment purposes.
I'm not sure it generates the best outcomes for the poorest kids in terms of early education.
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.
They built a lot on the labour reforms. They brought in the pupil premium and through the work of after the Education Endowment Fund,
some of the pupil premium saying stuff is beginning to have some impact.
They brought in trouble while they didn't bring it.
They built on what was a labour programme called Family Intervention Projects and greatly increased it.
The Troubled Families Programme, which again in for a very long time, wasn't showing any results at all.
But lately it's looking like it does have some, some good impact.
I keep looking at women and getting really nervous.
But anyway, they set up the Early Intervention Foundation, but the all and they set up the Education Endowment Fund.
Interestingly enough, the Early Intervention Foundation got what two million to start with.
The Education Endowment Fund got two hundred million to start with.
So their clear priority was about schools. It wasn't about wider child welfare.
And of course, they started developing Universal Credit and a very, very harsh system of austerity.
And what we argue in the book is that although most of the press reports and
most of you would be involved in the kind of work that's about service cuts,
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.
The Conservatives went up to 30 hours free, so again, expansion of childcare so that mothers could work.
They said if at work what works centre and children's social care, they've invested somewhat in CAMHS and relationship support again.
They were. The Conservatives were very clear on marriage matters.
They put in a benefit for married people. It's not a lot of money.
It's not enough money, I think, to make people get married. But they wanted to recognise that marriage work.
And actually, Cameron was quite, I thought, quite sweet because he his his support for gay marriage was about his support for marriage.
And I think for a conservative with that, I mean, it was part of the these conservatives are different from the old conservatives.
So the support for gay marriage was an interesting part of support and relationship support.
And their focus was on workless families and the impact on child outcomes.
And I'll say more about that in a minute. But they continued Universal Credit and they continued austerity.
And I mean, Universal Credit. Again, I would say, I think the basic principles were right.
I think those things that they were trying to fix were correct. I think the old system was too complicated.
It was too difficult to to wade through.
But I think what they fail to recognise is that there's a fundamental tension in that if you families are really complicated.
So if you want a system that's sensitive and responsive to how complicated families are.
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.
So the complications of family have to be dealt with by the benefits system.
The Universal Credit system was meant to reduce those complications, which was a good idea because they got so complicated.
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.
The system and a rigid system can't be responsive to those differences in families.
So I think that dilemma between how complicated families are and how a system that is complicated is too hard to manage.
But a system that is rigid doesn't take account of those complications is basically a fundamental tension to be managed in the system.
So what are the key features of of the of the two?
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.
I don't defend everything we did, but I defend a lot of what we did. Reducing pressures and increasing capabilities.
But the benefits of a growing economy, the benefits of money to spend and that, you know,
you cannot underestimate the difference that made in terms of the ability to try new things,
the ability to really invest and to really and I think in many cases,
probably not enough investment in evaluation as well certainly ensures that there was a massive investment in valuations in children's centres,
less so because then it was a coalition.
But the investment, I think, you know, I think we're really important under the Coalition and the Conservatives,
they really did want to increase capabilities.
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.
So there. So austerity trumped the issues about increasing family poverty.
Well, what's interesting also about the Conservatives is that the Conservatives manifesto
in 1997 actually said we want to minimise unnecessary interference in family life.
In 1997, they were still worried about the nanny state.
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.
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.
But there is a conservative ex secretary of State for Education talks about social mobility.
We have to care about the home learning environment because it's going to determine the futures of a lot of those children.
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.
If you level the playing field, then it'll all be OK because the cream will rise to the top.
So again, I have I have another story from my experience about how, in my view,
it's impossible to level the playing field and no country in the world has done it.
Other countries have less of a steep slope than we have.
They have less inequality than we have, and the difference between the richest and the poorest is less than we have.
But nobody has actually levelled the playing field.
So when I worked in Milton Keynes and a nursery in the early 80s, we did a lot of work on gender apologies.
Those of you have heard this story, but we did a lot of work on gender.
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,
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.
So this mother's response to growing unemployment amongst white working class men was.
Find a rich wife. It wasn't work hard at school. It wasn't what it was fine.
So but she was a loving mother. She wasn't an abusive mother.
This was not a family about the whole. This was a loving mother responding to the environment around her.
And again, I roll forward 12 or 15, however many years it is.
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.
And in the car on the way he would tell her what questions would be like and who would be.
Because he went to Cambridge. Now, he's not corrupt.
He is using what he has to benefit his child.
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.
And people like me will get the winter fuel allowance.
So a lot of the benefits that were lost to families and children were maintained for older people.
So the system is skewed, but how you level the playing field between that kind of social capital?
I mean, so I think it creates, you know, the story of social mobility,
I think has some very serious flaws in it in terms of what what it's possible to do.
So we've got different views on the causes and measuring high risk of poverty and disadvantage in the social exclusion force.
We did look at family income, we looked at housing, we look at mothers mental health.
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.
And we found that it was money, plus it was money plus poor housing money plus mothers mental health problems.
But that money did matter and it was almost I mean, when we did the work in social exclusion,
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.
And, you know, essential but not sufficient because relationships matter.
But also family income matters, and the love does, does matter.
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.
But if they don't like each other, they won't work together to do it.
So the love and money works at every single level, so when we did social exclusion and you had to work across government departments,
those we were always working with middle ranking or junior ministers, we weren't working at secretary of state level.
These middle ranking and junior ministers were always wanting to get a seat at the cabinet.
You don't get a seat at the cabinet by giving credit to somebody in another department.
You get it by claiming the credit yourself if they were friends, as, of course,
in politics, many people saw and knew each other the years they would work together.
If they didn't like each other, they wouldn't work together.
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.
DWP did a major piece of work, but just don't work with families.
So they were working with the most disadvantaged families and then found things like family breakdown, problem debt, substance misuse.
So the DWP, you know, disadvantages weren't about money, they were all about behaviours.
And again, that's a very, very important change. They were about what people do, and if only they wouldn't drink too much,
if only they wouldn't get divorced, if only they would, then it would all be OK.
Adverse childhood experiences were retrospective. How do you predict?
Well, based on what happened to you as a child,
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?
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,
and it became a mix of behavioural problems and a greater emphasis on how parents behaved.
So if only parents would do the right thing, if only they would provide the good family learning environment,
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.
So some policies do work. There is consistent evidence on the benefits of high quality early education,
I don't know why we have to keep proving it because we've been pooling it for about thirty five, forty years.
But there is good evidence. There's good evidence that actually over the twenty years, mothers and fathers spend more time with their children.
But interestingly enough, mothers of course, still spend much more time than fathers do, but fathers spend more than they did 20 years ago.
Mothers spend more than they did 20 years ago, even though they're working more.
But the social the gap in socioeconomic status on time with children remains and actually widened.
Educational gap is narrowing, but very slowly. And some early intervention programmes do work.
But the difficulty with the programmes that work is replication, so they work in one area because people are encouraged.
Increasing it really dedicated. They really want to do it.
They're interested in doing it with fidelity. And then what happens as sort of middle manager from another authority comes and visits,
and then he goes back and he says to his staff, Go, I saw this wonderful programme.
I think you should do it. Why don't we buy the manual and the sort of frontline staff get the manual?
And they're immediately the skilled.
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.
The other problem with implementation is that just Whitehall doesn't understand about time.
Whitehall thinks the minister thinks that the announcement is implementation,
and the civil servant thinks it's posting the guidance tick, that's done.
And the trouble is, civil servants, senior civil servants are super smart, which is a good thing.
I'm glad that the people who make policy for us are really smart, but that means they bore really easily.
And when they get bored, they want to move on to the next thing,
and the minister wants to move on to the next thing because once the announcements made, there's no credit anymore.
You know, when they always say, Oh well, they announce that six months ago, you get in trouble for it.
Now, you get in trouble for persisting, you get in trouble for sticking with the policy.
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
favourite piece of work that we did was the ten year childcare strategy in 2004.
It brought together benefits changes, training changes, children changes in every know.
It was a brilliant piece of work. And if you're a civil servant, there's nothing.
It just can't get better than the prime minister and the chancellor being in competition for your policy.
And that's what happened to me. Both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair wanted the policy, wanted the new work on early years,
and so Gordon was going to announce it as part of the pre-budget report.
And we were going to show number 11 there was going to be closed circuit TV.
There might be some people in the room who were in the room that afternoon.
So in number 11 Downing Street, we're going to have Gordon was going to announce it in parliament.
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.
I didn't want to invite all my friends to come to never live in Downing Street and not give them something to eat.
So it was all the stakeholders were coming to number 11 and they rang my office
at like 11 o'clock in the morning said they couldn't get the TV to work.
Well, I'm good, but I'm not that good.
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,
where Tony Blair lived. And they, the workmen in No10, refused to carry the Ariel down the corridor to number 11.
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.
That's how crazy these people were. Tensions to be managed.
I mean, I've sort of set a lot of this under understanding a problem is not solving it.
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,
Tom Jeffrey, who is brilliant, is that just one more PowerPoint isn't going to do it?
The analysis is useful, but it only gets you so far.
You really have to figure out what are the barriers? Who are the resisters? How do you win hearts and minds?
But we spend a lot of time on PowerPoint. Ed Miliband and PowerPoint.
Actually, you'd have a 20, a 20 slide pack and you'd get to three.
And with all the questions in an hour and a half. National local UK top down, bottom up.
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.
So I believes in local democracy, but I didn't want to be where we were on early years in nineteen ninety seven,
where it is up to local authorities to decide whether there was any early education
and childcare at local level at all and where I live in nineteen ninety seven,
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.
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.
But when it's anybody else's issue, I think you know what? Let it be local democracy.
But it's a very complicated story about how much should be nationalised, how much and at what level.
I'm targeting open access or universal. I think there's always a confusion about open access and universal.
I think of Universal as an entitlement. NHS is a universal service.
If you don't get a good service from the NHS, you can sue. You can go to judicial review.
Open access is where you have some services, where they happen to be in an area, but anybody can use them.
And I think the quality of children's centres and what the children's centres research found
was that open access services were most likely to get these families on the cusp who hadn't,
you know, they weren't severe enough to reach a targeted level, but with a little bit of help,
a little bit of support, and they tend to be non stigmatising.
So I'm a great fan of open access services and behavioural interventions or systems reform.
Well, obviously it's both. Where next?
Well, I think we have to reduce child poverty and grow capabilities.
That's what the book is about. I don't think government has set out what key entitlements are.
I don't care whether we call it sure start or whatever we call it.
We always have new names because that's the announcement. But what?
What is every child family individual? What can they expect from the state?
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.
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.
How do you reduce the flow into severely disadvantaged and try to get the curve moving the other way, flipping people over?
This is where I think open access services can do is get to people before they're at that very,
very severe rate and the flexibility to respond to the dynamic nature of family life over the life life course.
So this is my last slide, is it?
Yeah, right? OK, so we need to find the right balance.
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
missing is we spend so much time about the difficulties we stop and mind ourselves about the joy of being a child.
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.
It's nice if they can be good.
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,
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.
I was completely prepared for it being terrible and sleepless nights and all the horrible stuff I'd work with mothers.
Years before I had a baby, I was completely unprepared for how wonderful it is.
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.
And again, I'd like to say mother and father.
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.
So I'll finish with again, a family story that I think is about the joy of being part of its joyful part of.
It's pretty scary. When I was working in the Department for Education, I got a text from my son.
This is a while ago because he was at the G8 summit in Scotland and he was arrested and the text was arrested.
Now arrested out and arrested yesterday out now behaving responsibly.
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.
But anyway, so that weekend, when he came home after this out of jail,
he he met up with a friend who he had known at school, who had left school at 14 because he was bullied.
So Dan left school at 14 now, had a job, was in a relationship.
And yeah, but you know, I'd had a tough life leaving school at 14 and I was sitting chatting to them both.
And I said to Dan, So did you go to the.
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.
Thank you very much.