Child Poverty in Wales: Exploring the Challenges for Schooling Future Generations

By Lori Beckett

This edited book is about child poverty in Wales, specifically in a local school-community that identified its causes and effects, the challenges it poses for schooling future generations, and a series of local solutions that personify Wales’s devolved governments’ social democratic social imaginary. These responses all markedly contrast those of conservative UK Westminster governments espousing neoliberal logics for a global economy in consecutive prime ministers’ hallmark policies – Thatcher’s de-industrialisation, Cameron’s austerity, Johnson’s Brexit and Global Britain agenda, Truss’s Net Zero agenda, and Sunak’s new economic agenda in an effort to reunite the Conservative Party and win back public as well as business confidence. These policy agendas are invariably policy failures that play out for children and young people in their lived experiences of poverty and inequalities, and that find expression in social emergencies and humanitarian disasters apropos the cost of living crises, for example, as documented in this volume.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781837720620

Book preview

Child Poverty in Wales

Child Poverty in Wales

Exploring the Challenges for Schooling Future Generations

Edited by

Lori Beckett

© The Contributors, 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to The University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-83772-060-6

eISBN 978-1-83772-062-0

The rights of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The University of Wales Press gratefully acknowledges the funding support of the Higher Education Funding Council of Wales and Bangor University in publication of this book.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image © Freepik

the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act itself is becoming a tool of Wales’s ‘soft power’ in the world, where its very existence tells you about the characteristics of a nation open to change and prepared to be responsible for future generations.

Jane Davidson (2020). #Futuregen.

Lessons from a Small Country

For the children of Wales and future generations

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of figures

Foreword

Ruth Lupton

Editors’ Introduction

‘The little case that can’ conjoin the local and national to address child poverty

Lori Beckett

Chapter 1 Children First: a place-based approach to addressing poverty and inequalities

Caryl Elin Lewis

Chapter 2 A balancing act: juggling school policies in a community with unmet needs

Angharad Evans

Chapter 3 An ‘open door’ school policy for resident families: croeso/welcome!

Dafydd Jones

Chapter 4 Hungry kids: families’ food insecurity further exposed by the pandemic

Jess Mead Silvester and Paul Joslin

Chapter 5 Pride is key: the built environment, social housing and fuel poverty

Dylan Fernley, Pete Whitby and Grant Peisley

Chapter 6 ‘It takes a village’ to realise school-community development

Gwen Thirsk

Chapter 7 Lyricism and hip hop to counter miseducation in a school-community in poverty

Owen Maclean with Martin Daws

Chapter 8 Outdoor learning: addressing student alienation and disengagement by building social capital

Graham French with Claudia Howard

Chapter 9 Collaborative school improvement: developing research-informed support for social justice

Richard Watkins

Chapter 10 School Heads: enacting school-community development in response to child poverty

Eithne Hughes

Chapter 11 The consequences of child poverty and inequalities for future generations

Sue Whatman

Chapter 12 Towards a critical understanding of Wales’s present for future generations

Lori Beckett, Graham French, Carl Hughes and Gwen Thirsk

Appendices

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This edited book has been five years in the making, with time out in 2020 with Covid-19 lockdown, which is a remarkable team effort under the circumstances! So, first and foremost, thanks must go to the organisers of the Policy Forum for Wales (Fforwm Polisïau Cymru), who accepted my request to attend their keynote seminar on school standards and the National Education Plan in Cardiff in early 2018. This followed my retirement after twelve years as Professor of Teacher Education at Leeds Metropolitan University.

It was a truly remarkable experience to listen to a variety of speakers on schooling and education in Wales, which was seemingly so distinctly different to the model promoted in England. Arwyn Thomas, the managing director of the North Wales Regional School Improvement Service (gwasanaeth gwella ysgolion rhanbarthol Gogledd Cymru), known as GwE, reported on some innovative strategies for developing the organisation in support of schools, which again contrasted so markedly to what I had heard in England.

This chance meeting resulted in an invitation from Arwyn Thomas to visit GwE in North Wales, meet and discuss my concerns about poverty and schooling but also my impressions of Wales’s system of school improvement, all set against the background of my work in teacher education in Australia and England. This ultimately led me to Bangor University, where I met the head of the School of Education Sciences, Professor Carl Hughes, and Caryl Elin Lewis, who had won the competitive tender for the 2018–19 Welsh Government-sponsored Children First needs assessment on Trem y Mynydd, to use its pseudonym. This resulted in an invitation to join a lively group of frontline workers, including the school Head, multi-agency workers and managers, all gravely concerned about the lot of resident families, including children and young people.

The upshot was an edited book proposal, which brought me to the University of Wales Press, so my sincere thanks go to Llion Wigley for expert editorial advice and for considerate understanding as the contributing authors came to juggle sickness with Covid and then the fall-out in terms of work commitments. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of the book proposal and of the book manuscript, and Dafydd Jones and the production team.

This extends to Emeritus Professor Bob Lingard (University of Queensland), who not only provided me with critical feedback on our ideas but who provided invaluable directions on what it takes to be working in a nation-state that espouses social democracy. A glimpse of the depth and breadth of these ways can be gleaned from a cursory glance at his prestigious published work, which has had a profound effect on the tenor of our work.

I am particularly grateful to Honorary Professor Ruth Lupton (University of Manchester), who stepped up to write the foreword in an act of great generosity given her retirement and my need for a very prompt response. She brought such insight and acumen to the task, which was not surprising given her prestigious published work, which likewise has had a profound effect on our moving forward on policy advocacy. I am also especially grateful to Professor Philip Alston (University of New York), who brought more clarity to the twin ideas of systemic and structural change, building on his 2018 probe into Extreme Poverty and Human Rights in the UK, and another public statement on the cost-of-living crisis in the UK reported by Harry Clarke-Ezzidio in the New Statesman, 30 August 2020.

The necessity to develop a keen sense of poverty and inequalities on site and the potential of contextualised school improvement sparked a curiosity in local histories, which meant academic partners also embarked on documentary research. So sincere thanks to staff in Llangefni library and curatorial staff in the Bangor University Archives, Gwynedd Archives, and Wales’s National Museums including the Bangor Museum and National Slate Museum, as well as Wales’s National Library and the so-called National Library in London.

Finally I would like to acknowledge and thank colleagues in the School of Education Sciences at Bangor University, in particular Head of School Professor Carl Hughes and Deputy Head of School Graham French for the support they lent to the Bangor PLUS project and to my nomination as Visiting Professor. I would also like to acknowledge and thank Professor Parlo Singh and Dr Sue Whatman (Griffith University) for the support they lent to the idea of a multi-cities ethnography and to my nomination as Adjunct Professor. The multi-cities project, which includes Bangor and Brisbane, was a direct result of colleagues working on the BERA Commission into Poverty and Policy Advocacy reaching out to colleagues in the AARE equity network, who all in their own ways provided support for continuing the Bangor PLUS project.

In closing I would also like to give heartfelt thanks to my family and friends who unfailingly provide love and support, but especially Lin Williams, Mary Roddick and Steve Roddick in Wales, Sibyl Fisher and Paul Hughes in England, along with John Beckett, Ann Stewart, Chris Evans, Barb Hollard, Mela Cooke and Beryl Cooke in Australia. Last but by no means least, grateful acknowledgement must go to the team of contributing authors and resident families on Trem y Mynydd, who showed me such fighting spirit in their quest to battle against rising poverty and inequalities because it demands so much more than simply an abstract moral argument.

LIST OF FIGURES

Image 1: reproduced with kind permission from iStock.com/tracy-williams-photography.

Penrhyn Castle was home to the Penrhyn family dynasty and designed to showcase its power and enormous wealth garnered in its slate quarries in North Wales but also in its sugar plantations in Jamaica. It was gifted to the National Trust in 1951 by Lady Janet Harper in lieu of death duties.

Image 2: reproduced with kind permission from Wales National Museums.

This posed photo of a quarryman, positioned at a slate rock face and harnessed by a rope secured cliff top in the Snowdonia mountains, shows the working conditions at the heart of the lengthy and bitter 1900–3 Penrhyn Quarry dispute that also included trade union rights and pay.

Image 3: reproduced with kind permission from Wales National Museums.

This slate workshop shows the mechanisation introduced in the nineteenth century to speed up the production of roofing slates during the Industrial Revolution, which came to dominate not only the landscape of Gwynedd but its way of life given the employment of 20,000 people in industries prior to the First World War.

Image 4: reproduced with kind permission from Wales National Library.

This train engine was named after Linda Blanche Douglas-Pennant (1889–1965), granddaughter of the second Lord Penrhyn, George Sholto Gordon Douglas-Pennant (1836–1907), who was a protagonist in the Penrhyn Quarry dispute in 1900–3.

Image 5: reproduced with kind permission from Wales National Library.

These train waggons were a feature of the pioneering rail/port arrangement carrying dressed slate tiles from the Penrhyn Quarry on a 6-mile journey to Port Penrhyn, where they were then loaded onto a fleet of sail/steamboats destined for domestic and overseas markets.

Image 6: reproduced with kind permission from Bangor University.

The Penrhyn Arms Hotel in Bangor, built in 1799 as a coaching inn, became the first site of the University College of North Wales, which opened on 18 October 1884. Funds were raised by quarrymen among the 8,000 workers who subscribed to the university. Note the ‘knowledge is power’ motto.

Image 7: reproduced with kind permission from Wales National Library.

This shows the 4th Lord Penrhyn (middle/seated), Hugh Napier Douglas-Pennant (1894–1949), who sold parcels of land to Bangor City Council, some for social housing following enticements from the UK Government in Westminster to local councils to mitigate housing shortages in the interwar years.

Image 8: reproduced with kind permission from Gwynedd Archives.

This extract of a letter to the editor of the North Wales Chronicle, dated 13 December 1935, provides some insight into the public debates about Bangor City Council’s plans for social housing that amounted to hundreds of new houses being built. Note the reference to future generations.

Image 9: reproduced with kind permission from Gwynedd Archives.

This front cover of a booklet prepared by Bangor City engineer, B. Price Davies, provides a glimpse of Bangor City Council’s concern about standards in regards the planning and economics of housing design as well as public administration, all peer-reviewed in an open competition, and prize-winning.

Image 10: reproduced with kind permission from Gwynedd Archives.

This shows Port Penrhyn with sail boats ready for loading dressed slates at the quay built in 1821. These were likely part of a fleet owned by the Penrhyn family and though others had shares in shipping, in 1897 the 2nd Lord Penrhyn purchased a fleet of steamers from the Anglesey Shipping Co.

Image 11: photo reproduced by kind permission from Gwynedd Council.

This front cover of a booklet prepared by Llechi Cymru provides details of the key areas of the slate landscape located in Gwynedd and the vision to protect, conserve and enhance its Outstanding Universal Value. Inside it notes the heritage industry contributes £180m to the local economy.

Image 12: reproduced by kind permission from Storiel Bangor.

This photo of a Welsh Not artefact held in Bangor Museum was hung around a child’s neck for speaking Welsh in nineteenth-century schools, a consequence of anti-Welsh bias notably in the 1847 Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales, later known as the Blue Books.

FOREWORD

Ruth Lupton

Out of the gloom

The context in which I write this foreword seems exceptionally gloomy. There is war in Europe and an accelerating climate emergency. Public services and communities are only just managing after more than a decade of austerity and a global pandemic. And we now face another potential humanitarian disaster as energy prices soar. Although one might expect all this to stimulate bold and innovative policy responses, the social policy of the Westminster government has been almost paralysed for nearly seven years first by Brexit and then by Coronavirus, and has become apparently very hard to influence through academic research and evidence. From my position in England, it sometimes feels that nothing is being done, and maybe nothing can be done.

But of course things can be done, even in an unfavourable national policy context, and we need to hear about them! This is why I am particularly pleased to have the opportunity to write a foreword to this inspiring edited book, Child poverty in Wales: Exploring the challenges for schooling future generations. Both in the way it has been put together and its messages, it points to some of the possibilities of change, not just the challenges (although these are also pertinently highlighted).

Shedding light on the present

One thing that the book demonstrates is that, working together, local residents, front-line workers in schools and in multi-agencies, academic partners and critical friends can articulate and narrate the issues facing low-income neighbourhoods in detailed, careful and compelling ways, so that they can be seen and heard by people with the power to make things change. The majority of academic work on poverty takes place inside universities, working with statistics and surveys. Important journal articles using large scale data can influence policy and build careers without anyone leaving the office. Illuminating the day-to-day reality of life on the end of failed policies is more difficult. Academics working in and with communities rarely gain plaudits or promotions. Residents and front-line workers don’t necessarily want students and ‘boffins’ poking around in ways that don’t make any difference to them. So books like this, with academic partners mentoring and supporting practitioners co-developing research perspectives, are hard to pull off, and they are unusual.

But they are important, because they have the potential to reconnect policy making with the ‘lived experience’ of those experiencing policy effects or omissions. Reading about the detail of the daily work in the school office (Ch.6), for example, must make politicians, advisers and policy makers ask questions about their education plans and proposals. What do they mean by a ‘community school?’ Why is it better to ‘send in’ Family Engagement Officers, rather than provide more funding to the school to support its existing family support work? Why should low-income households need to pay £60 for a ‘support letter’ in order to make the case for re-housing? What resources do schools need if they are going to be providing this kind of support? These are difficult questions that are nor posed by more distant or abstract work, and they demand answers.

Demonstrating the importance of history

Perhaps even more important than this, the book rams home the importance of history as it plays out in the present, which should spark some intense debate about the place and its people. This is in marked contrast to policy cycles that are short. Politicians only have a short time, and usually not much spare money, to make their mark. There’s a real temptation to launch high profile initiatives targeting the pressing problems of the day. But these come and go. When I researched twelve of the poorest neighbourhoods in England and Wales, back in the late 1990s/early 2000s,¹ most of them had seen a variety of short-lived programmes and initiatives over the years. Some had helped. But the problems that these neighbourhoods faced had been decades in the making.

The detailed ‘back story’ of each place mattered, as it matters in Trem y Mynydd. But there were common histories of decline and underinvestment. Globalisation and technological change had favoured more competitive places. Privatisation and the shrinking state had stripped out the foundational services people need. Cuts to the welfare state had punished the poor and widened inequality. So short term, small-scale interventions could not, on their own, make a significant difference. Policy solutions needed to have the same long term time span as the underlying problems, and the same attention to structural causes, economic geography and the politics of class relations.

This edited book, which has grown out of the Bangor Poverty and Learning in Urban Schools (PLUS) project, has collected, though images and archival work, shared knowledge of labour, achievement and pride, but also of injustice, exploitation and resistance. It provides an invaluable resource through which current residents (especially young people) can connect with past identities, events and struggles, and reimagine their futures. More than that though, it provides a deep, critical and informed historical account which must make it hard for politicians to fall back on short term, superficial fixes.

In my experience, it is all the more powerful when accounts such as these from different places are joined up, making the structural causes visible over and over again. Projects which link across national boundaries, like this one, with Sue Whatman’s work in Brisbane, are rare. More similar links would further add to the value of this book, and it highlights work already done in trying to pull together a multi-cities ethnography across the UK and Australia.

How things can change

In a time of policy paralysis at the UK level, it is good to be reminded of the power of local action, and the determination and capacity that exists in almost every school-community for what Richardson (2008) called ‘DIY Community Action’.² This is striking here, as is the need for institutional trust and funding agility to get behind the social action that people with front-line knowledge of their own communities are already organising, responding quickly and appropriately to the pressing issues.

But Trem y Mynydd’s problems demand wider action too. You will draw your own conclusions about what needs to happen as the account of Trem y Mynydd’s struggles unfold in the chapters that follow. Three major things struck me.

One was the deep and sustained reinvestment that is needed in places made poor over decades. Short term funding streams, thinly spread, are not going to produce the economic and social regeneration that is needed. This point is increasingly being made in UK-wide debates around what is commonly referred to as ‘levelling up’. For example, the UK 2070 Commission argued that the UK needs a sustained, 50-year, ‘levelling up’ plan, with major reinvestment in skills, devolution of power, transport and economic investment. It should ‘go big or go home’.

Experts including the Centre for Cities³ have pointed out that what the UK needs now to tackle in regional inequalities is economic investment on the scale of that seen in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Sustaining huge inequalities between the South East of England and the rest of the country is socially unjust and economically foolish. Hard and shortened lives cost us all. But it needs political will and ambition, from Westminster as well as Cardiff.

The second was the need to reconnect education policy with wider social and economic policies. In our recent book,⁴ Debra Hayes and I argued that trying to fix ‘disadvantage gaps’ in education in isolation from the accelerating problems of child poverty and unequal childhoods has been one of the ‘great mistakes’ of education policy in both England and Australia in recent years. Here, from Wales, we also hear loud and clear about the pressure educators feel to respond to thin and meaningless targets (disconnected from local realities) and to do so through standardised pedagogical and leadership approaches.

This edited book is a clarion call to the Welsh Government (and those in other nations and jurisdictions too) first of all to make sure that the problems of child poverty are adequately addressed by decent social security and multi-agency approaches, not left to schools, and secondly to entrust heads and teachers with developing curricula and pedogogy that engage, energise, empower and connect children and young people. It is salient that an Australian academic is a key player in this project. Many of the good examples of contextualised schooling in disadvantaged communities come from that country.⁵

Third, I was struck by the need for greater imagination and courage to embrace new ideas in economic and social policy. This book draws on foundational economy thinking. FE highlights that traditional growth models neglect the fact around 40 per cent of the workforce is engaged with providing basic goods and services, upon which wellbeing and ‘civilised life’ depends. The primary role of public policy should be to secure basic goods and services as forms of collective consumption. Education, training, economic development and climate action should be linked to an area’s ‘foundational economy’, as in the case of the Not-NEET’s project described here.

But the foundational economy is just one among a number of emerging developments in economic thought and action which offer new ways of meeting the current challenges of economic change, inequality (and associated costs of social welfare) and climate emergency in more holistic ways. They include Inclusive Growth, Doughnut Economics, Community Wealth Building and Wellbeing Economy. In social policy, there is international interest in moving from traditional welfare state models to the provision of Universal Basic Income (UBI) or alternatively to Universal Basic Services (UBS) or a form of ‘Social Guarantee’.

Whilst in England, there is a distinct lack of interest, at national governmental level, in these developments in economic and social policy, this is not the case in Wales, which is a leader internationally, and widely looked as a leading exemplar of new social democratic thinking. Translating the ideas and top-level statements into changed investment priorities and practical, funded action on the ground is still a work in progress, as this book demonstrates. But the Welsh context certainly creates cause for hope that old policy mistakes will not just be rehearsed, and new more radical directions will be taken, with more equitable consequences. All the more important, then, that cases like Trem y Mynydd’s are made visible.

Call to action

In many ways, it is a shameful reflection on contemporary UK society that this book has to be written. Surely no-one can come to these chapters without feeling shock and shame at the deep poverty still endured in Trem y Mynydd and the failures of the policies of the last quarter century to make things better.

But the book is also a call to action. It demonstrates how local communities, working with allies from universities, charities and government, can embrace, exemplify and drive change, and it articulates the support and imagination they need from local and national government. At a time of general gloom, I feel sure that those who read it will be moved and inspired by its honesty, courage and radicalism. I hope that it plays its part in stimulating action not just for Trem y Mynydd, but for the many communities across the UK and internationally that continue to be held back by similar injustices.

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

‘THE LITTLE CASE THAT CAN’ CONJOIN THE LOCAL AND NATIONAL TO ADDRESS CHILD POVERTY

Lori Beckett (Bangor University)

Introduction

This book, edited by an academic partner to the Trem y Mynydd school-community, recounts the work of a determined group of school staff, multi-agency workers and academic partners who joined forces with resident families and critical friends to push back against child poverty, especially its ongoing influence on schooling success. Trem y Mynydd is a pseudonym, in line with ethical protocols to protect the identity of these people and anonymise this place, which has a fascinating history that is tied to the Penrhyn family dynasty of slate-mining infamy in North Wales and beyond. Its history of disadvantage is in the present, marked by successive UK government policy choices, which sees the locals battling the damage done by de-industrialisation, unemployment, exploitation of the working poor, universal credit, benefit cuts and Brexit.¹ These lived experiences were all exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw people here dealing with a social emergency that melded into the cost-of-living crisis rightly called a humanitarian disaster.² Yet they show not only remarkable fortitude but also ingenuity in devising local solutions to these problems of poverty and inequalities.³ These are then linked to projects that guard against children, young people and adults joining the ranks of those not in employment, education and training, which is to take advice from the Child Poverty Action Group (2017: 208) that the best strategy is to ensure that they should not be poor.

I came to this school-community through a series of referrals via the North Wales regional school improvement consortia GwE and Bangor University,⁴ where I met Caryl Elin Lewis, who had won the competitive tender for the 2018–19 Welsh Government-sponsored Children First needs assessment (health and well-being). She invited me to Trem y Mynydd, specifically the sessions she had designed to solicit professional advice and input from participants, including the school Head, multi-agency workers and managers, and local authority workers, on improving the lot of resident families but specifically children and young people. This dovetailed with the 2015 Well-being and Future Generations (Wales) Act, a cornerstone of Wales’s suite of progressive policies from its devolved government. In a brainstorming session to plug into Lewis’s final report and strategic plan that included practical policy recommendations to Gwynedd Council and Welsh Government, the ongoing need for further research was made known.⁵ This was the subject of intense debate, especially given local residents had made it known that they wanted nothing to do with research that made no difference to their lives.

I stepped up to canvass support for building a place-based action study to become part of a multi-cities ethnography that was just coming into being given the recommendations from our BERA commission on poverty and policy advocacy (see Ivinson et al., 2018; Ivinson and Thompson, 2020). The Bangor Poverty and Learning in Urban Schools (PLUS) project⁶ was then developed in Trem y Mynydd, with support from Bangor University’s head of the School of Educational Sciences, Professor Carl Hughes, who sponsored two series of six-monthly seminars designed to mentor and support practitioners to become research- and policy-active. My role was then formalised as a Visiting Professor at Bangor University, which coincided with my working with colleagues as an Adjunct Professor at Griffith University in Brisbane. The first series of seminars overlapped with the release of UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston’s (2019) probe into Extreme Poverty and Human Rights in the UK, which featured Wales and which drew our attention on human rights and the Welsh Government’s response to the report. This culminated in a planned presentation to invited guests: Wales’s then Children’s Commissioner Sally Holland, and Alasdair Macdonald, an adviser to Wales’s then Education Minister, Liberal Democrat Kirsty Williams.

This intentional move laying the ground for engaging in research-informed policy advocacy at local/national levels instructed the substance of the second series of seminars, which intended to plug into the multi-cities ethnography taking shape across the UK and Australia. The core Bangor PLUS team of research-active practitioners assembled here then decided to work towards an edited book. I reached out to international policy scholar Bob Lingard (University of Queensland) to discuss ideas, given that he was well placed to provide feedback on a social democratic social imaginary, which is reflected in successive Welsh governments’ progressive policy frameworks.⁷ Thinking about how things might be otherwise infused the Bangor PLUS