Unicef report may be flawed, but there is still much to worry about

The Unicef report on child well-being in rich countries caused an instinctively sceptical reaction in me, partly because of the known left-wing bias within the UN agencies and partly because of its reliance on relative income measures. As I commented to Cicero earlier today (I have since rectified the typos!):

I fail to understand how a poor child in Britain is worse off than an even-poorer child in Slovakia, simply because the British child is able to see a Porsche from her window rather than a clapped out Lada.

Having said that, I’ve decided it’s best to read the report before spilling too much virtual ink. Sadly (sic.), I’m about to disappear off to Cape Town (where the temperature is in the 20s and the sun sets late over the sea) and so won’t have time to read it and write about it until it is quite stale, so I’m going to make a few observations based on the very informative annex, which has the 40 separate indicators which led the report writers to their conclusions.

Having reviewed these, I remain very sceptical of the relative poverty issue. Furthermore, many measures are based on subjective reporting (“aspiring to low skilled work”; “finding their peers kind”; “agreeing with the statement that…”) and others are probably based on surveys that may not be entirely accurate (reports on how many books are in a house or how many educational tools – did the children consider the family computer an educational tool? Or a toy?).

Nonetheless, perhaps a third of the measures were clear, objective measures based on official statistics in which we ought to have at least some faith. The following stand out as cause for real concern:

· Above average infant mortality
· Above average number of births with low birth weight (they say “birth rate below 2500g” but I am inferring what they meant!)
· Below average immunisation against DPT3 and Polio, and significantly below average immunisation against Measles
· Above average number of overweight 13 and 15 year olds (according to BMI).
· Significantly below average participation in education among 15-19 year olds
· Below average number of 15-19 year olds in either education or employment
· Significantly above average number of children living in single-parent and step families
· Significantly above average adolescent (15-19 year old) fertility rate

(For statisticians among you, ‘Significantly’ refers to more than one standard deviation difference, which puts the UK into the bottom quintile).

No matter how you cut it, that means that the UK’s children are less healthy and dying more often than peers in less wealthy societies including the Mediterranean countries, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Malta. They are not undertaking as much further study and are more likely to expect to work in unskilled employment – not a good place to be with a billion Chinese yet to join the global labour market. Traditional family structures are more fragile (though I hesitate to draw any conclusions from this).

I do not believe it follows that the solutions must be more Government intervention in family lives or massive statist structures institutionalising childhood. But there is clearly room for improvement in our public health and education, currently subject to two of the largest Government departments. A more thorough immunisation programme, better sex education and improved technical educational opportunities for non-academic school leavers would be a good start.

One thing is for certain: despite the instinctive scepticism and lingering doubt of myself and many liberal-minded colleagues, this report leaves no room for complacency.

Tell it how it is!

The UNICEF report into child well-being has acted as a lightning conductor for opinion across the political spectrum.

It has also generated headlines that in this one issue say so much about the various newspapers and their editorial stance. A comparison made me smile. If I’d not matched them up, I’m sure you’d have had no trouble guessing!

Independent: Our national disease is lack of parental time Independent: If we want to help children, the state has to step in. But will ministers dare advocate this?

Times: Blind feminism has hurt our children

Guardian: Give our children more respect, urge campaigners

Daily Mail: Blame game amid Britain’s child scandal
Daily Mail: The sick family of Europe

Telegraph: Children need stability and boundaries more than money

Express: When childhood really was tough

UPDATE: British tyranny marches on

Last week I reported that schools had been taking fingerprints of children without the permission of the parents and storing them on databases. Liberal Democrat MP Greg Mulholland has raised the issue and forced the Government to issue guidelines to schools (which had previously been operating in a regulatory vacuum) but the practice continues. Lewisham Cllr. Brian Robson informs me that at least one Lewisham School is among the offenders.

I wrote to the Office of the Information Commissioner last week to check whether this was a breach of data protection legislation. Amazingly, they have told me that the Data Protection Act does not apply because “…biometric data is not considered to be personal data under the Data Protection Act 1998.” What can be more personal than my unique fingerprints (except, perhaps, my innermost thoughts) I do not know. The map of my DNA, perhaps?

Perhaps, but this too is not covered. Apparently, “when the school takes the finger print, the system changes the image into a series of numbers which you couldn’t use to identify an individual”, and as such it is not protected. That these numbers could be decoded to reproduce a unique fingerprint did not appear to be relevant or of concern to Data Protection Case Reception Unit.

Maybe this explains the Government’s insistence that it can keep the DNA records of children, even when they have committed no crime, and add them to its new central database.

Winston Smith is turning in his unmarked grave!

British tyranny marches on

I said that the most recent edition of Liberal Democrat News was unusually good. The story about Fingerprinting in schools was truly jaw-dropping:

‘Schools have been fingerprinting pupils as young as three, often without parental consent, storing their biometric data for use in electronic registration and library systems, despite concerns over whether it is legal…
[I]n response to a letter from Liberal Democrat Education Spokesperson, Greg Mulholland MP, Education Minister Jim Knight confirmed that the government will be issuing draft new guidance about fingerprinting in schools’, having previously refused to do so.

Well done Greg!

But the underlying story still leaves me absolutely horrified and makes me wish to push the point further than Mulholland or the rest of the party have so far. It is not enough that the government should issue guidelines on this matter. The fingerprinting of children that have not committed an offence without the express permission of their parents is a violation of their right to privacy.

As with the issue of children’s DNA records and the national database, this represents another step towards a surveillance society. That it should be aimed at innocent children is terrifying.

State education condemns millions of children to the scrap-heap

The failure of Government policy on education was highlighted today in two reports. In one, literacy expert Jean Gross suggests that poor literacy is costing the State £2 billion a year in lost earnings and additional public expenditure. Meanwhile, figures from the Office of National Statistics suggest that there are 1.24 million people aged between 16 and 24 who are not in work, training or education, a 15 per cent increase since Labour came to power. The figure is worse for 16 and 17 year olds, where the increase has been 27 per cent.

This comes as no surprise when one considers that the OECD estimates that around a third of school leavers in the UK are functionally illiterate, ranking below such countries as Finland, the Czech Republic and Portugal. It doesn’t need to be this way; Sweden regularly achieves a 100 per cent functional literacy rate.

It does not take a genius – or even a degree of literacy – to recognise that these two factors are linked. Most people would expect to be able to read and write before they leave primary school, yet a huge minority enter secondary school completely unable to cope with the demands. These are the children that become disaffected and give up on an education system with which they cannot cope. Two in every five school children leave without any worthwhile qualification. With little prospects of a job in an age when Britain is a developed, information-driven service economy, they drift into unemployment, and from there to drugs and crime. It is no coincidence that while one in three school leavers cannot read and write, in our prisons the statistic is seven in ten.

If after eleven years of compulsory education the State cannot impart the most basic skills necessary for 21st century life – literacy and numeracy – it is time to accept that State education is failing. While the best performers in the OECD survey were the highest spenders, overall there were no correlation between expenditure and literacy. Rather, the problem is in a system that lumps children of all abilities into one, uniform type of school, prioritises the choices of bureaucrats over those of parents, stifles innovation among teachers creates no incentive for success.

The solution is more competition, performance related pay, parental choice and autonomy for schools that wish to innovate. The State’s role is to ensure that education is available to all irrespective of wealth or background; that does not mean it needs to provide education itself. This will be best achieved by giving parents the spending power, allowing the money to follow the pupil, while schools compete on quality and on specialist provision to cater for the needs of the children they wish to serve. With power in the hands of parents and schools competing for children, the quality of service will rise. In education, that means more literacy, a stronger economy and less crime.