Last night I went to a fascinating talk at Kings Place with Polly Toynbee, Camila Batmanghelidjh and Conservative MP David Willets debating the question “Is Britain Broken?”.
All agreed that looking at the quality of childhood was a powerful way to measure the “Brokenness” of Britain. Camila spoke of how many disadvantaged young people are being made to feel that their “lives are not worth while” by being refused support from social workers, as they do not quite fit into the “vulnerable enough” category. This was seen as being due to insufficient budgets going in to social care, and the dominance of a target-driven culture.
Polly Toynbee and Camila Batmanghelidjh both enforced the point that the financial situation is not a valid excuse for ineffective children’s services; providing hope and support for our children should always be priority. As an example of how skewed priorities can be, Camila presented the fact that on the run up to the year 2000 ten times the annual budget spent on children’s mental health services was spent on building the disastrous “Millennium Dome”.
I recently conducted research in Manchester, spending time with families in the most disadvantaged areas of the city. I met many people whose lives had been turned around by connecting with the services at their local Sure Start Children’s Centres. This support is surely imperative to “fixing” so many of Britain’s problems- social, economic, and political- and should be prioritised no matter what the economic situation. The children are the future!