1 Sweet Dreams

If I was to be restricted to a single source, or reference point, for analysis of poverty and disadvantage in the UK, then I would choose the Joseph Rowntree Foundation website. As you can see from their home page http://www.jrf.org.uk they conduct wide ranging research projects and produce excellent research reports that are available free, as pdf files. For example, of current interest to the Brightside Trust, is the study http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/eBooks/2063-education-schools-achievement.pdf which is an example of a quantitative study using large data sets.

These investigations often find their way into the national news and have for many years acted as a spur to social policy. For example, this project which literally mapped out the increasing social divisions in the UK http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6984707.stm . If you look round their website you'll find many similarly insightful reports. What I particularly like, is the way that their findings are often both surprising and counterintuitive. For example, http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/findings/socialpolicy/pdf/2123.pdf found that “Just 14 percent of variation in individuals' performance is accounted for by school quality”. I was genuinely surprised by this finding, as I had assumed that individual school quality was overwhelmingly important to overcoming educational disadvantage. I guess I had formed this opinion on the basis of government policy and statements of the past 20 years, which, in my opinion, have assumed individual school performance to be fundamentally, indeed at times, exclusively important. For us, as a charity addressing disadvantage, I believe this finding potentially broadens not only the site or focus of our work but what we see that work achieving. For example, the way mentoring and e-mentoring works towards overcoming disadvantage must be seen as much more than a school supplement.

It also suggests that understanding social disadvantage needs to be more imaginative; for example, I felt the approach adopted by the ‘dare to care campaign’ who asked children what they thought defined living in poverty was interesting. Not having a mobile phone featured strongly in the replies.
http://www.daretocarecampaign.com/News/Missing-school-trips-makes-you-poor---say-British-.aspx