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
Monday, 8 October 2007
2 Private Parts
The first avowedly commercial enterprise, BPP College, has been authorised to award UK degrees http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7012203.stm . In my opinion, this will be the first of many. While no minister would say it, I believe that it is government’s hope that by increasing the numbers and types of suppliers of degrees that this will drive up efficiency and quality standards at the old polytechnics who are at present the bulk suppliers of degrees to the masses.
3 Do you feel lucky?
Philanthropy and 5% (or maybe 20%)
‘The Cabinet Office has opened a consultation on the working of a new £10million risk capital investment fund for social enterprises. Many social enterprises find it difficult to access risk capital, leaving a gap in their finances. The risk capital investment fund will fill this gap and help develop better access to private and independent investment in the future.'
I don't know if it's a conscious revival of an old movement, but there were Victorian social housing companies that informally used the slogan ‘philanthropy and 5%'. It was a sort of ethical investment campaign of the 19th century, where money was raised to build social housing while guaranteeing the investor a moderate return on their money. I guess this is intended to be a similar model, so I cannot see this fund offering a high return to investors.
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/third_sector/documents/consultations/consultation_risk_capital.pdf
However, if we at The Brightside Trust had a ‘sure fire hit' of a project, and wanted to raise between £250,000 and £2 million, might this be an appropriate vehicle for funding. Do we have anything to contribute to the consultation exercise, given our experience of funding successful projects?
‘The Cabinet Office has opened a consultation on the working of a new £10million risk capital investment fund for social enterprises. Many social enterprises find it difficult to access risk capital, leaving a gap in their finances. The risk capital investment fund will fill this gap and help develop better access to private and independent investment in the future.'
I don't know if it's a conscious revival of an old movement, but there were Victorian social housing companies that informally used the slogan ‘philanthropy and 5%'. It was a sort of ethical investment campaign of the 19th century, where money was raised to build social housing while guaranteeing the investor a moderate return on their money. I guess this is intended to be a similar model, so I cannot see this fund offering a high return to investors.
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/third_sector/documents/consultations/consultation_risk_capital.pdf
However, if we at The Brightside Trust had a ‘sure fire hit' of a project, and wanted to raise between £250,000 and £2 million, might this be an appropriate vehicle for funding. Do we have anything to contribute to the consultation exercise, given our experience of funding successful projects?
4 Calm before the storm
Once again, the Sutton Trust has produced a research report that has triggered public debate. In particular, the finding that a third of places at Oxbridge are given to pupils from only 100 schools, 80% of which are private. This short piece from the Guardian poses the question, ‘whose job is it, universities or government, to transform the educational chances of poor children?’ The two contributors, the universities minister John Denham, and Wendy Piatt, waltz through the current debate with no apparent animosity in this Guardian article
http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialexclusion/story/0,,2176286,00.html .
However, I think this mild mannered debate could get rather edgy rather rapidly. There is great unease in the Brown government that progress in reducing social disadvantage in the UK seems to be slow. The government are still committed to their very ambitious objective of ending child poverty by 2020, so there is real frustration that something as ‘easy’ as opening up higher education to the socially disadvantaged seems to be making little progress. Equally, on the basis of recent discussions I've had with some Aimhigher staff, they too are frustrated, but in their case because of what they see as government’s inability to stick to a consistent strategy or to let them get on with the job. Instead they find they have to cope with ever changing demands and guidelines. I predict this will come to a crunch next year, when schemes which cannot prove in detail that they are working with disadvantaged students, in the terms laid out by HEFCE, will suffer a ministerial biting. Remember, Gordon Brown only allowed himself one class struggle moment in the last 10 years, when he attacked Oxford University’s admissions procedures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Spence_Affair
As an end note, I notice that john Denham mentions that every secondary school is to have a higher education partnership and “We'll soon be setting out how formal partnerships through academies and trusts can be established.“
http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialexclusion/story/0,,2176286,00.html .
However, I think this mild mannered debate could get rather edgy rather rapidly. There is great unease in the Brown government that progress in reducing social disadvantage in the UK seems to be slow. The government are still committed to their very ambitious objective of ending child poverty by 2020, so there is real frustration that something as ‘easy’ as opening up higher education to the socially disadvantaged seems to be making little progress. Equally, on the basis of recent discussions I've had with some Aimhigher staff, they too are frustrated, but in their case because of what they see as government’s inability to stick to a consistent strategy or to let them get on with the job. Instead they find they have to cope with ever changing demands and guidelines. I predict this will come to a crunch next year, when schemes which cannot prove in detail that they are working with disadvantaged students, in the terms laid out by HEFCE, will suffer a ministerial biting. Remember, Gordon Brown only allowed himself one class struggle moment in the last 10 years, when he attacked Oxford University’s admissions procedures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Spence_Affair
As an end note, I notice that john Denham mentions that every secondary school is to have a higher education partnership and “We'll soon be setting out how formal partnerships through academies and trusts can be established.“
5 Young at heart
In my opinion, the Young Foundation are the UK’s leading analysts of innovation and the role of the third sector. They have recently produced a report “In and out of sync: growing social innovations” which seeks to explain why certain social innovations grow and why others don’t. For example, why did the Big Issue newspaper flourish in the UK but flop in California? The report has a strong analytical structure and is enlivened by a series of attention-grabbing case studies
http://www.youngfoundation.org.uk/files/images/In_and_Out_of_Sync_Final.pdf
The report identifies four conditions that are essential for developing innovative products, services and models on a large scale and in a sustainable way:
demand for the innovation within society;
good supply of ideas in workable forms;
effective strategies to connect supply and demand, and to find the right organisational forms for putting the innovation into practice;
ongoing learning and the ability to adapt to changes in the external environment.
I believe this is what we have been doing at The Brightside Trust, but I'm not sure that we have been doing it in an overt and systematic fashion, perhaps we should.
http://www.youngfoundation.org.uk/files/images/In_and_Out_of_Sync_Final.pdf
The report identifies four conditions that are essential for developing innovative products, services and models on a large scale and in a sustainable way:
demand for the innovation within society;
good supply of ideas in workable forms;
effective strategies to connect supply and demand, and to find the right organisational forms for putting the innovation into practice;
ongoing learning and the ability to adapt to changes in the external environment.
I believe this is what we have been doing at The Brightside Trust, but I'm not sure that we have been doing it in an overt and systematic fashion, perhaps we should.
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