Champions for Children

The Lives of Modern Child Care Pioneers

Bob Holman

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781447312598
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Política de salud

Numerous books have been written about Victorian child care pioneers, but few biographical studies have been published about more recent child care and welfare giants. In the revised edition of this classic book, Bob Holman, a champion for children in his own right, looks at the lives of six inspirational individuals who have made significant contributions to the well-being of disadvantaged children. Each of the six discussed - Eleanor Rathbone, Lady Marjory Allen, Clare Winnicott, John Stroud, Barbara Kahan and Peter Townsend - has been important in establishing present systems of child care and welfare, and in stimulating debate around issues which remain high on policy and practitioner agendas. Champions for children is essential reading for childhood and youth studies, sociology of the family, social work, social welfare, academics and students with an interest in child care and welfare issues.

Epilogue

Champions for children appeared in 2001. With the death of Peter Townsend in 2009 all the champions discussed in this book are now dead. But they are not forgotten. Eleanor Rathbone’s contribution has been articulated in recent debates about child benefit while Frank Field MP continues to draw attention to her distinguished parliamentary career. Marjory Allen’s name is still attached to old and new adventure playgrounds. Barbara Kahan is known to today’s social workers for her careful analysis of what is required from children’s residential care and for her success in drawing attention to child abuse. John Stroud’s novels, particularly The shorn lamb, still sell, and his bringing together of literature and childcare has been praised in an academic journal (see Hardy, 2005). A biography of Clare Winnicott was published in 2004 which led to renewed interest in the part she played in supporting her husband, the child psychiatrist, Donald Winnicott, as well as her expertise as a psychoanalyst (Kanter, 2004). Peter Townsend was amazingly prolific, both as a researcher and writer, right up until his death. Since then, his writings have continued to be read widely, with his life celebrated in The Peter Townsend reader, including contributions from a number of academic experts (Walker et al, 2010).

There is something more. The social conditions, the nature of social services agencies and the financial circumstances of the families who were the concern of these champions have changed significantly in recent years. The question arises: are the champions still relevant? I believe they are, but limit myself to just one aspect of each of them in which I think we can still learn from them.

Eleanor Rathbone

The economic crash of 2009-10 in Britain was caused by bankers and financers making too many loans at high interest that could not be re-paid. In the midst came the election of a Coalition government (Conservatives and Liberal Democrats), whose austerity policies involving huge cuts in public spending have led to greater unemployment, frozen wages at the lower end, fixed social benefits and less effective social services. In turn, these policies have contributed to a huge drop in the incomes and living conditions of thousands of families.

The official measure of poverty remains at those in households with incomes below 60% of the median income. By 2011, 3.8 million children were living in poverty, with the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) calculating that this would increase by another 600,000 by 2013 (CPAG, 2011). Even though the minimum wage was raised in 2011 to £6.08 an hour, research at Loughborough University has demonstrated that this will not be sufficient to provide the necessities of life, and recommend an increase to £7.20 an hour. Yet 20% of employees were earning less than this amount (Stewart, 2011).

Low incomes and benefits have led to increased homelessness that has made it even harder for some parents to cope with their children. The Trussell Trust, which provides food parcels to families who receive a voucher from social workers or other officials, expanded its number of branches rapidly in 2012. A survey of teachers in the same year recorded that 83% had seen pupils coming into school hungry (Campbell and Butler, 2012).

The response of government ministers to the growth in poverty and unemployment has been three-fold. First, Prime Minister David Cameron called for parenting groups to train parents in how to look after their children properly and, in particular, to equip them with the skills and motivations to succeed at school and to obtain jobs. Second, the Department for Work and Pensions contracted with mainly private firms to ensure that unemployed people – including many disabled people – sought and obtained employment. And third, severe pressure and punishments have been applied to the workless in the form of having to work without pay or having benefits reduced.

Iain Duncan Smith, currently Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, displayed some compassion towards those in poverty while he was in Opposition, but this changed when he came to office. In 2012 he declared, ‘If you just give people money, they almost always just feed the problem, such as drug addiction, you don’t solve it’ (The Guardian, 2012). A few months later, The Observer reported on a paper by The Centre of Social Justice, founded by Iain Duncan Smith, and said that ‘It was unremitting in its determination to frame child poverty as mainly an issue of morality and behaviour, citing adult addiction, poor parenting, worklessness and family breakdown’ as the cause (The Observer, 2012). Government ministers and the right-wing press blamed ‘lazy adults’ for preferring to live off benefits rather than work. These ‘lazy adults’ then ended up raising children who copied their bad habits.

The solution was to push them into jobs, through private firms, with little regard for their health or the low wages they might receive. Those, especially the young, who did not try hard enough to find work would have their benefits reduced or even removed. From April 2012, 124,000 unemployed single parents with children about to start school were instructed to find work within eight weeks or risk losing benefits. Parents were not allowed to choose to stay with their young children if they thought this the best way to maintain family life and healthy parent–child relationships. The imposition of a housing benefit cap means that numbers are now being forced to move to areas with cheaper rents despite the adverse effect this has on making children change schools and friendships and despite the fact that the areas are more likely to have high unemployment. In June 2012, the Prime Minister announced that he intended to scrap housing benefit for those aged under 25 living in council or private rented housing. He said, ‘The system is saying to these people. Can’t afford a home of your own? Tough, live with your parents.’ He added that those who did not find work after two years on Jobseeker’s Allowance would face compulsory community work (The Herald, 2012b).

Eleanor Rathbone’s relevance is that she too lived in times when many were in deep poverty, when they were blamed for their low incomes, and were punished by the harsh Poor Law. On re-reading information about her, I was impressed again by three factors that counter those of the present government. First, in a study of casual labourers, she emphasised the strengths of poor mothers despite the erratic employment of their husbands. Some mothers pooled resources to run money clubs that enabled them to overcome fluctuations in their incomes. Second, she recorded the low wages of many male workers that was not due to their lack of willingness to work hard. Third, she perceived how the state, through the Poor Law, tended to blame and punish the poor. She acknowledged that although a minority of women were negligent and immoral to the detriment of their families, the majority were not, but if they became destitute, they were condemned and harassed by officials. She concluded that poverty was imposed on families by an economic system and unhelpful state policies. Her recommendation that mothers required an allowance paid direct to them came into being as Family Allowance in 1945. It was never at the financial level she wanted, and has now been weakened by Working Tax Credits that subsidise employers so that they can pay lower wages.

Eleanor’s analysis can still be applied today – the poor should not be blamed for their poverty; the majority of children living in poverty have parents who are in work; and addiction occurs only among 4% of families. The Prime Minister, in saying that the under-25s should be forced to move back in with their parents, overlooked that some did not have parents and that others had parents who had no spare rooms. He has also failed to grasp that cutting benefits by millions will remove money that had been spent locally and that had maintained local shops and jobs.

Recent research has undermined the notion that Britain is impoverished by a welfare culture that many of those on benefits have chosen to follow as a lifestyle choice. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation sponsored a study, headed by Professor Tracey Shildrick, which interviewed people aged between 30 and 60 who were in low-paid jobs or on benefits. She also drew on material from 230 individuals in deprived areas. An important finding was that long-term unemployment was comparatively rare. Instead, those studied tended to move in and out of badly paid, temporary jobs and in and out of state benefits. Shildrick wrote, ‘The important story of commitment to taking poor quality jobs, which often pay too little to move people away from poverty and make a real difference to their lives, runs directly counter to the dominant popular story about welfare dependency’ (2012). There is little, if any, evidence of an entrenched welfare dependency. On the contrary, most sought work and, when they found it, it was usually through their own efforts and not through the privately run welfare to work firms. They were prepared to travel long and costly distances to undertake unpleasant tasks which brought them little more than if they stayed on welfare benefits.

These findings confirm my own observations while living in deprived neighbourhoods for over a quarter of a century – I know that most residents are anything but work-shy. More typical is a middle-aged friend who is long-term unemployed, but every week he applies for jobs. If he gets an interview he may be competing against a score of other applicants. He wanted to accompany a youth camp to help as a volunteer, which would have been good work experience. But he was, in my view, punished by job centre officials who refused him permission to go as it coincided with the day he was due to sign on and he was required to be available for work. And this, in a place where one advertisement for an administrative worker received over 950 applicants. I kid not. My friend has now been directed to unpaid voluntary work that mainly involves digging gardens. The fact is that many families are in poverty despite being well-living citizens and good parents. They did not bring about the recession, and they did not increase unemployment. Their poverty is mainly due to a lack of money.

What would Eleanor Rathbone’s proposals be for today? Family Allowance set at a level sufficient to ensure that basic needs could be met? A level of wages that would take families out of poverty? Their income would be spent in their communities and would help revive the economy. Not least, those on lower incomes should be treated with respect and encouragement, not blame and condemnation.

Marjory Allen

In the original book, I chose Marjory Allen as a champion mainly because of her leading role in improving the care of children in public agencies. I also made mention of her interest in the need of all children to experience and enjoy play. It is this interest that I find particularly relevant today.

Play can be defined as voluntary activities in which children find recreational enjoyment. Academics regard it as making an important contribution to cognitive development and socialisation. Marjory Allen was no academic but she understood the importance of play. As a mother in the 1930s, she formed and ran a nursery school to which she took her daughter, Polly. It was more like the latter day playgroups in which children played freely with adults near at hand.

After the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, she was concerned about mothers, evacuated with small children, who had to leave their landladies in the morning and wander around until they were allowed back in at blackout time. Marjory campaigned for nursery centres where children could play, rest and be fed. She succeeded in raising the money – and the interest of the government – to establish a number of centres.

In the cities, the Ministry of Health promoted day nurseries where working mothers could leave their children. However, the staffing of the nurseries was dominated by health professionals who, Marjory claimed, were not adept at promoting play. Anticipating that day nurseries were likely to decline after the war when there would be less demand for women workers, she campaigned for nursery schools to be mandatory for all local authorities, nursery schools that regarded play as central. Legislation to this end was passed in 1944, but its implementation was consistently postponed.

After the war, Marjory became interested in the growing number of adventure playgrounds and soon became chair of the London Adventure Playground Association. These playgrounds, usually located in the open air in urban areas, allowed children to take adventurous risks in the presence of skilled staff. The one of which I was a committee member in Handsworth, Birmingham, saw children lighting fires and cooking meals on them, climbing trees, swinging on ropes and building dens in concrete pipes. It also contained a wooden hut in which games could be played when it rained. Adventure playgrounds encourage children to play together, to care for domestic animals that may be kept on the site, to learn how to construct objects from raw materials and, above all, how to enjoy themselves in the open air.

During the early 1960s, pre-school playgroups multiplied. They are organised groups for children mostly between the ages of two and five and usually run by voluntary groups in local halls. Initially run by volunteers, in particular, parents, the formation of the Pre-school Playgroups Association became a stimulus for training the leaders, for conferences and, in some places, the payment of professional staff. I remember speaking at its annual conference that was attended by hundreds who displayed a tremendous enthusiasm for what they were doing.

The playgroups were not intended to provide full-time care for the children, with a playgroup session lasting two to three hours, and children attending two to five times a week. Parents could stay for the whole session but often just stayed until their children were settled. They were not seen as nursery schools but as places where children enjoyed play in the company of other children and under the guidance and care of interested adults. Of course, play is a means of learning, of being introduced to constructing models, becoming familiar with books, painting and singing. But there were no exams, no educational curriculum. In 1972, Sir Keith Joseph, speaking at a conference of the Pre-school Playgroups Association, identified playgroups as a major means of developing children’s ‘social and intellectual needs’ (quoted in Butterworth and Holman, 1975, p 375).

The centrality of children’s play has since declined. After the war, I spent much of my free time in a nearby park. I recall 30-a-side football matches with a tennis ball, cricket, rounders, races – all organised by ourselves. A number of adults were always strolling around. Today, far fewer children play in parks unless accompanied by parents. The reasons include a vast increase in traffic that makes crossing roads to the parks more dangerous, and a reduction in the number of supervisors we called ‘the parkies’. Many parents now feel that their children are not safe on their own and could be approached by strangers. It may well be that the availability of long hours of television and electronic games give children alternative pleasures at home. Not least, statutory bodies have sold off much public ground to house builders.

From the 1990s onwards, adventure playgrounds found it increasingly difficult to obtain funding and sites. The one with which I had been associated in Birmingham folded when its ground was required for the construction of a school. The playgrounds did not disappear, however, and at least eight still include Marjory Allen’s name in their title. The same applied to pre-school playgroups, the demand for which has dec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• one Eleanor Rathbone (1872-1946)
• two Marjory Allen (1897-1976)
• three Barbara Kahan (1920-2000)
• four John Stroud (1923-89)
• five Clare Winnicott (1906-84)
• six Peter Townsend (1928-2009)
• seven Bob Holman (1936- ): A child care participant living through the changes
• eight Past, present and future
• nine Epilogue
• Bibliography