Good evening
It is a pleasure and a privilege to join you today in this wonderful venue.
As an honorary professor at this prestigious university, I felt both humbled and nervous when I was invited to follow in the footsteps of many distinguished speakers to address you about a topic of personal and professional interest. It was relatively easy to select my theme – Rediscovering childhood – because it is of such paramount importance to the future of our society.
During the next hour, I will outline my concerns, my view of the case for change, and my reflections on the need for a coherent and wide-ranging strategy to restore and champion childhood for all children, irrespective of their family circumstances.
To start – a more general reflection on society…
A barometer of our nation’s moral health is the way in which we treat the more vulnerable and dependent members of communities – our elders and our children.
Our elderly population is growing – and medical advances mean that we have a rising number of nonagenarians – a 53% increase in the UK in the last twenty years. And of course, that’s just an average – one which varies according to postcode. Life expectancy for a man in disadvantaged Blackpool is 10 years lower than that in relatively affluent Kensington and Chelsea.
But old age anywhere is often characterised by loneliness, as families have dispersed and traditional strong intergenerational bonds may have fractured under the stress of modern life. Communities where at one time everyone knew their neighbours have become more insular, and it’s all too easy to get lost.
Edwin Brock’s poem Five ways to Kill a Man– written in 1972 – is an ironic list of ways in which humans have been eliminated through methods which reflect their point in time: medieval jousting, aerial bombardment… The poem ends with a dispiriting vision of isolation –
‘There are cumbersome ways to kill a man.
Simpler, direct, and much more neat
is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century and leave him there.’
The conditions of modern life at that time – poverty, hunger, disease, unemployment, homelessness, despair – were seen by the poet as killing more effectively than any active method. A society was being created where people slowly died from deprivation, malnutrition, and hopelessness – the passive withdrawal of basic necessities. Most importantly, in this dystopian scenario, no one bears responsibility. When a man dies from poverty, no individual "killer" can be identified. Society itself becomes the killing mechanism. The poem reveals that modern civilization has generated a system where killing happens passively, invisibly, and without individual accountability.
I suggest that the picture is even starker in a twenty first century lived at frenetic pace, with the news dominated by images of fractured alliances and corrosive discontent.
And the way in which we treat our children is similarly concerning. Let me paint a picture of a child growing up in modern day Britain. Some of you may have heard me paint this picture at the annual CST conference, but please indulge me for a few moments.
A child born in innocence, unaware that many of the factors which may determine their outcomes are already set through a combination of genetics, postcode and economics.
A child who lives in a home where family income doesn’t stretch to the end of the week, and where there is a continual struggle to meet everyone’s needs.
This picture in itself is nothing new; our literature is full of the ghosts of youngsters whose childhood was stolen by poverty, who descended into criminality to ward off starvation, or fell victim to diseases which were curable for those blessed with money.
Today, poverty is still about meeting basic needs – addressing the first rungs of Maslow’s social hierarchy. But it has become more complex. Our children don’t actually starve, except in heartbreakingly extreme cases – but many suffer malnutrition associated with poor diet. Obesity is increasingly the province of the poor. Our children don’t actually live on the streets – but too many are in substandard, temporary accommodation without the stability of a place to call home. And swathes of children’s lives are characterised by a poverty of opportunity.
Let’s think some more about our imaginary child.
Their life isn’t ordered by alarm clocks and routines, so they are often late to school, and some days don’t turn up at all. When they go to school, they find communication hard. School is a confusing place. They get angry with themselves and with everyone around them. They have learned fight or flight from a young age. They throw objects, cry, sometimes kick or bite. They may be neurodivergent – as an increasing number of children are – victims of the confused age in which we live.
At school, they are the bully’s target. Other children tell them that they are stupid or that no one wants to be their friend. And sometimes the adults don’t hear these comments.
And so, our child feels that they don’t belong.
And sometimes the adults begin to think of the child as the problem – and there are probably more children with significant needs in the class. Support services are so overstretched that getting through the day feels like climbing a mountain. Like their peers, our imaginary child may be prone to anxiety – maybe of such intensity that they become a prisoner in their own mind – or they may be caught up in the net of a predator who sees and exploits their vulnerability.
Like their peers, as they grow older, our child will spend an increasing amount of time engaging with social media where they see images of a life they can’t afford, where they don’t recognise disinformation as being malicious, where they will read versions of conspiracy theories, presented as having scientific validity.
Their ambitions for the future may be thwarted by poverty, or they may not even get as far as harbouring ambitions because they don’t have the role models and mentors to encourage them.
They may look for solutions in the dark shadows of the web. They may not be able to distinguish truth from fiction. They may be easy prey for those with malevolent intentions.
Our children, in the main, don’t suffer the intense privations endured by Victorian mudlarks. Society has moved on because of the pioneering work of those who passionately wanted to make a difference.
But childhood remains perilous, and our children are the citizens – and potential leaders – of the future.
We all recognise these children, and we all want them – and our schools – to flourish. And it’s only natural to look to other organisations – CAMHS, children’s social care, Youth Justice – to provide at least some of the answers. But we have to accept that changing fortunes for the better requires a monumental national effort, uniting schools, families, support services, charities, business, government. The financial challenges experienced by the country are not going to disappear any time soon. We are seeing a dramatic rise in need alongside a diminution of resources.
While we scorn the Victorian presumption that children should be seen and not heard, we often turn a deaf ear to children’s concerns because we are too preoccupied to listen, or a blind eye to the abuse they experience daily online – abuse which we unwittingly facilitate by equipping even the youngest with devices to consume social media before they have the capacity for critical discernment.
Television has been described as the electronic babysitter – but at least when this expression was first coined, the device was large and visible to the family – and the choice of programmes was controlled by watersheds and digital limitations. But our insatiable appetite for anytime, anyplace entertainment and increasingly sophisticated technology, means that today’s children are routinely entertained on devices, sequestered from their families by earbuds and engaged with unmediated content. And so, the reliance on trusted adults to model behaviours, provide comfort and explore real and imagined worlds is disintegrating – and the peer pressure enabling this transition is often irresistible.
I am not claiming that childhood was universally idyllic in the past. It wasn’t. Abuse has always been present in society – children were enslaved to the demonic machines of the industrial revolution, unaware that there could even be a better life. But the nature of abuse has changed subtly, becoming more insidious and arguably more mainstream.
It is manifested in the sense of isolation felt by children, a mirror image of the loneliness of the elderly. It is the sadness of children who no longer play out freely, whose bedrooms (if they are fortunate enough to have them) increasingly form the backdrop for their physical and emotional development. As reflective beings, we live within our thoughts. Our inner lives and internal monologues are vivid. Mark Haddon’s recently published autobiography Leaving Home– illustrates this point in fascinating detail. His fear of the monsters of his imagination will be shared by many who experience night terrors. The point is that if children cannot express their hopes, fears, uncertainties through play which they structure for themselves, with their friends, life becomes increasingly difficult to navigate. Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosieand Lucy Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe are populated by children who may have grown up in poverty, but who experienced the joy of exploring friendships and oneness with nature in the uncontained outdoors, conditions which are alien to many children today.
This is not nostalgic navel gazing – the digital genie cannot be squeezed back into its mythical bottle – but we have to take action to rediscover childhood, to challenge the notion of children as mini-adults and restore childhood as a unique time.
In a nutshell, too many of our children are unhappy.
For the last 14 years, the Children’s Society has surveyed a representative sample of young people across the UK and asked questions about their levels of satisfaction and their concerns. Levels of wellbeing have reduced progressively over time. Principal worries include finding a home, finding a job, having the right appearance, and the state of their own mental health. And for the first time – in the 2025 survey – school was perceived negatively by significant numbers of young people, who don’t feel that they belong, whose confidence has been dented by the system.
Reflect for a moment on some of the comments made by those who were surveyed:
“There is a standard being pushed of what everyone should look like and that plays a big role with satisfaction if you don’t feel like you meet that.”
“Unkind relationships are there between many students, students feel peer pressure to fit in which leads to large friendship groups who make fun of others.”
“If you’re not seen as achieving…you’re not belonging.”
Behind these comments is profound, unnerving unhappiness.
Against a picture of deteriorating wellbeing, there has been limited improvement in academic standards. Surveys conducted by PISA (most recently reported in 2023), considering pupils’ proficiency in reading, writing and science, show that the highest performing education systems tend to be in East Asia, with Singapore outperforming all other education systems in all subjects. Although remaining significantly above the OECD average, England’s average score in 2022 was significantly lower than in 2015. This is despite a national push over several years to raise standards in the basic skills.
Outcomes for different groups of pupils within England vary widely. Unsurprisingly, poverty remains a major inhibiting factor, as the disadvantage gap in the country – the difference between the attainment of pupils eligible for free school meals and their more advantaged peers – remains stubbornly wide. The report from the Education Policy Institute in 2025 showed that the 2 million children in England identified as disadvantaged continued to perform poorly – only 25% achieved grade 5 or above in English and maths at GCSE, compared with 52% of their non-disadvantaged counterparts.
Cutting the data geographically, in Blackpool, 30% (less than a third) of pupils achieved grade 5 or better in the basics, compared with 61% in Kensington and Chelsea. And grade 5 is such an important gateway.
It’s unacceptable that only half of our children realise this ambition anyway – but for three quarters of disadvantaged pupils to leave secondary education with underachievement compounded is a national disgrace. It’s a sign that we are failing in our long-stated mission to decouple the link between poverty and academic success – which we know is the route to a better life.
GCSE is of course the culmination of a child’s twelve years in the English education system. And disadvantaged pupils perform less well on every step of that path – from early years onwards.
This is not a revelation to you.
The question is what are we going to do about it.
You might be asking yourselves why I have linked educational standards with happiness. The answer is twofold.
Firstly, good wellbeing is an essential precondition of learning. You don’t learn well if you are tired, hungry, cold or scared, or feeling constantly on the backfoot, sensing that you don’t belong.
Secondly, children who succeed have greater self-esteem, which is a crucial element of wellbeing. We live in a competitive world. We are judged on our achievements in all aspects of life. Failure may be character building if you have the resilience to bounce back, but repeated failure – which you don’t have the toolkit to withstand – really hurts.
I am not trying to perpetuate stereotypes here. We have disadvantaged young people who flourish despite their starting points – I commend Poorby Catriona O’Sullivan as a story of incredible success in the face of griding poverty. The deprivation the author suffered throughout childhood was awful, but sadly far from unique. Looked Afterby Ashley John Baptiste is a similarly inspirational account of the broadcaster’s achievement despite a childhood spent in the care system. Both Catriona and Ashley showed amazing determination, and their autobiographies are heart wrenching. Notably, both found people who believed in them, who gave them courage to fight, and the tenacity to find and develop their talents.
But for every Catriona and Ashley, we have thousands of children whose life chances are blighted. Children who start school with poor language and personal development, children for whom every milestone is a small trauma; children who may be lost to our struggling education system because it is simply too difficult to navigate, because their educational needs are not met, their parents’ voices are unheard, and the roads not taken to secure their wellbeing.
The problem of disengagement is growing too, manifested in the rising numbers opting for elective home education. In Blackpool – one of England’s most deprived towns – 2% of children are officially home educated (that’s not including the ones who have never engaged with the system). Parents cite bullying and their children’s frail wellbeing as factors influencing their decisions to opt out of school, and while some have taken active steps to find engaging alternatives, others are relying on anytime any place online solutions which have the dubious advantage of avoiding early morning arguments about getting up in time to follow less flexible school routines.
In England, there is no defined requirement for the home schooling curriculum and no accountability for its implementation. By contrast, home schooling is illegal in some European countries, such as Germany and heavily regulated in others including France and Denmark, where the rights of the child to a suitable curriculum are prescribed and inspected.
For many children, withdrawal from the state system is damaging and very difficult to reverse. It’s stepping away from a universal service into the unknown. Safeguarding risks are highlighted in awful cases such as the death of Sara Sharif in 2023, whose removal from school apparently made her suffering invisible. Cases such as these are the extreme and steps are now being taken to protect the children known to be most vulnerable. But the more fundamental issue is – how are we getting it so wrong that families turn their backs on school?
There is a need for profound and urgent change.
We need to secure our schools as irresistible places which uplift children.
We need nothing less than a new social contract for childhood which puts in place the structures enabling all children to feel safe and flourish.
And we need to stop the constant political infighting and focus on what really matters – reclaiming the territory of childhood to focus on happiness and wellbeing as preconditions of academic excellence – two sides of the same coin.
The Nigerian proverb that “it takes a village to raise a child” was reiterated in the Good Childhoodreport, emphasising that a child’s upbringing depends on the collective effort of a community – parents, families, teachers and civic organisations. It underscores the idea that children thrive best when supported by a network of caring individuals. This must form the basis of the social contract – and I would argue that it must include
national political leaders, irrespective of party. Because, ultimately, this is about how we nurture the leaders of the future by building strong foundations in childhood.
I maintain that long-term reform rests on five distinct but inter-dependent pillars:
- Pillar 1– the elimination of child poverty
- Pillar 2– providing a mental health guarantee from pregnancy to 16
- Pillar 3– broadening the definition of educational success
- Pillar 4– creating a safe, secure childhood
- Pillar 5– supporting families and addressing inclusion
These pillars are far more than a programme of actions. They are the basis of a generational settlement. They require the co-operation of successive administrations, employers, civic institutions, community organisations, as well as the education sector.
I will consider each pillar in turn.
Firstly, we have to make child poverty history. This is a much broader issue than education. We cannot persist in accepting that swathes of our country are always going to be blighted with the status quo of ill health and reduced life expectancy. I mentioned earlier the poor health fortunes of Blackpool citizens. It’s also worth noting than in 2025, 16% of 16 year olds in Blackpool (almost 5 in every class) were NEET – they didn’t continue into education, employment or training, in comparison with 9% of pupils nationally. They didn’t progress on to pathways to escape the poverty which cripples the town. Blackpool is symptomatic of coastal areas whose decline is attributable to a whole range of social and economic factors – but we can’t overlook the disadvantaged children in everycommunity. Every child matters, more than ever before.
Brave steps are being taken to tackle poverty. From April 2026, the two-child limit on the child element of Universal Credit, which has been in place since 2017, will be removed. The Institute for Fiscal Studies , the End Child Poverty coalition , and the Resolution Foundation have all identified this reversal as the single most impactful step that government could take to reduce child poverty.
Critics of the change say that this move will negate families taking personal responsibility, and that parents should make decisions about having children based on what they can afford. They miss the point that the removal of the limit will lift an estimated 450,000 actual children over the poverty line by 2030, according to the government’s impact assessment. Furthermore, 88% of affected families have three or four children – not the huge numbers of offspring often implied in media coverage, and the majority of these families have at least one parent in work. This is the key difference in how the face of poverty has changed over the last twenty years – at the start of this century, poor people were more typically unemployed. Not now. It is simply disingenuous, and frankly insulting, to suggest that parents make decisions about the size of their families depending on the level of benefit they anticipate receiving.
A cost-benefit analysis reported by Save the Children suggests that child poverty costs the UK economy an estimated £39 billion per year – more than ten times the £3 billion annual cost of scrapping the limit. Children who are relieved of poverty have better life chances, improved health, and eventually increased economic earning power.
Welcome as it is, the end of the two-child limit is not sufficient in itself to end child poverty. The first pillar of an impactful social contract requires a more extensive child poverty strategy. Poverty, health, housing and access to services are inextricably interrelated, starkly shown by the fact that between 2019 and 2024, 74 children (of whom 58 were babies under one year old) died in circumstances where temporary accommodation was recorded as potentially having contributed to their death. This is both tragic and patently unacceptable. We have heard the desperate testimonies of parents forced to make the choice between heating their homes and putting food on the table, and of children for whom going without the basics of sufficient food, school equipment, access to leisure activities, and stability on which to build future dreams is a daily lived reality. The steps outlined in the Government’s document Our Children, Our Futureare significant – including tackling the national affordable housing shortage, ending no fault evictions, increasing the national living wage, expanding free school meals provision and broadening holiday food and activity programmes.
Key to the success of these measures will be their continuity beyond the life of the current administration. We have seen too many examples in the past where a change in policy direction has plunged children into poverty or reduced the opportunities for their families to source reliable help – including the untimely end of Sure Start programmes. We know what has to be done to eliminate child poverty: increase family income, make the essentials affordable and strengthen local support for families. Without concerted and continuing partnership working we cannot effect transformation, but this demands more than immediate fiscal measures. Without a shared drive to put children first, ahead of astronomical business profits, we will see just another good intention that didn’t deliver for the children who most need our help – ourchildren who will ultimately determine our nation’s future.
Partnerships play a huge role in supporting families experiencing poverty. Voluntary and third sector organisations need to be recognised for their huge civic contribution. We aspire to live in a society where nutritious food is affordable for all, but in the meantime, we have to prioritise expanding the availability of foodbanks and hygiene banks through work with supermarkets and charities if we are to meet our children’s basic needs. We live in a society in which good food routinely makes its way into landfill while families go hungry – wasteful inequality which we haven’t tackled systematically through a sustained drive.
Fundamentally, we need an explicit commitment that all future budgetary decisions must include a childhood impact assessment. While India faces its own challenges with abject poverty, it offers a strong example of policy-making that places poverty at its core. The country’s Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index brings together a wide range of indicators – including nutrition, child mortality, school attendance, years of schooling and access to basic utilities – and uses their combined impact as an essential precondition for policy development. We need something similar: a framework that systematically assesses the impact of decisions on childhood.
The second pillar of my proposed contract is a mental health guarantee supporting children from before birth to 16 years. Poor mental health has grown exponentially in our schools. Twenty percent of children aged 8 to 16 years in England had a probable mental disorder in 2023, with girls being more likely to experience psychological distress and self-harm, and young people who are LGBTQ+ being at higher risk. A report by ONS shows a strong chicken-and-egg correlation between persistent absence and experience of
poor mental health, along with the increasing incidence among children who have education health care plans. Long delays in receiving support, due to severely overstretched services, exacerbate the conditions experienced by young people and their families.
Initially, this concerning picture was attributed to Covid, and the catastrophic impact of successive lockdowns on children’s development, particularly amongst those who were disadvantaged and vulnerable. Undoubtedly the pandemic had a seismic influence on the whole of society, but we cannot assume that it was a discrete event, rather that it accelerated a set of conditions that were already brewing, including the impact of all-pervasive social media and the diminishing number of safe places available for children to play and explore. We need to look at the root causes of the problem and develop strategies for early intervention.
Children’s mental health does not begin at age 11 or at crisis point - it begins before birthand is shaped continuously by family, school and community. A mother’s mental health during pregnancy directly affects the child, even more starkly if accompanied by substance misuse and domestic violence. Evidence from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner cites that these factors lead to increased mental ill health amongst children and greater dependence on services such as CAMHS and social care. Pregnancy is the earliest point of prevention, and rapid support for pregnant women experiencing stress and anxiety needs to be a health priority nationally. If we wait until secondary school to care about mental health, we have already waited too long. If we want children to be emotionally secure at 14, we must support families at the very start of life.
We already have the foundations. Start for Life, Family Hubs, perinatal mental health services, and health visitors all explicitly treat pregnancy as the start of child development. Let’s treat these services as essential infrastructure, not discretionary extras. Let’s ensure that they are reliably accessible within all communities, so that early help averts later crisis.
For strong mental health,it is essential that every child has a trusted adult. In the autobiographies I mentioned earlier, this was largely a matter of serendipity rather than planning. We cannot assume that all children have access to adult support outside school and so we need to ensure that we provide it.
We will also make better progress if we measure flourishing rather than focusing solely on distress. Currently, our systems mostly work on a deficit model, measuring absence, behaviour incidents, anxiety and depression and referrals and thresholds. Those measures tell us something has gone wrong. They do not answer the question: “Is childhood going well?”
Surely a healthy system should track positive conditions, not just failure signals.
My proposal is for a national flourishing and wellbeing index. The Government White Paper rightly explores engagement frameworks which tell us whether children are participating in particular activities, but engagement is not the same as flourishing – this would tell us whether childhood is actually working, whether the impacts on our children are positive and sustainable.
The ONS publishes annual children’s subjective wellbeing and related indicators, complementing the National Wellbeing Framework. These measures are useful, but they are not integrated into education policy and schools are not required to report against them. They are not child-centred frameworks, nor are they granular enough for local or school level decision making. We need something better.
There is good practice in parts of England, for example, BeeWell in Greater Manchester, where experts from The University of Manchester and the Anna Freud Centre are working with leaders from Greater Manchester Combined Authority and the city-region’s secondary schools on a major new project that surveys children about their wellbeing and preparedness for life beyond school. As a result, schools measure not just mental health symptoms but belonging, safety, purpose and joy. Schools within my own trust – Star Academies – are participating in this initiative, and noting its benefits for children, whose opinions really count.
These measurements go beyond public exam results, attendance, behaviour and mental health symptoms alone. A framework that captures the quality of children’s lived experience – including belonging, safety, connection, purpose, joy, agency and voice – is a powerful tool which provides an incontrovertible evidence base to spur improvement. This is not a totally new idea. In the past, ‘happiness indicators’ have been ridiculed as soft alternatives to academic rigour. To be clear, I am not suggesting that a framework would replace literacy and numeracy standards. It would be complementary to academic measures, not an alternative to them. Let’s get away from the polarising debates which have stifled system transformation – let’s accept that wellbeing is a necessary condition for achievement.
The third essential pillar of our contract for childhood is a broadened definition of educational success. Literacy and numeracy remain the indispensable foundations of achievement for every child – and every child deserves the dignity of mastering these skills. It is patently unacceptable that a quarter of children left our primary schools in 2025 without securing the expected standard in reading or mathematics. For them, life at secondary school is likely to be a dispiriting uphill struggle to access the curriculum – and inevitably, disadvantaged pupils are over-represented in this depressing statistic. The long shadow of Covid continues to loom – this cohort missed out on their early primary education because their schools were closed and provision very patchy – especially for the poorest in society. So, we have to sharply focus on training our teachers – and supporting families – to help our children read. I am dismayed by accounts from early years settings of children trying to scroll printed books in the same way as they would scroll a screen because they are unfamiliar with the concept of turning a page. Books are treasure troves that we must open to all children. And numbers are a universal language of which fluency is essential in our digital lives.
So, examination results are important staging points – but they do not represent the entirety of childhood. We also need to develop character, virtues, curiosity and creativity, both within and way beyond our classrooms. I welcome the government’s focus on enrichment and look forward to the Enrichment Benchmarks which will be published later this year. But we need to go further: we need a properly funded national entitlement to enrichment for every child. This will not be something that schools can deliver on their own within overstretched budgets. High quality enrichment requires innovative partnerships between schools, cultural organisations and businesses – museums, galleries, theatres, orchestras, third sector and voluntary organisations. There are many examples of amazing cultural entrepreneurs and philanthropists – the Clore Duffield Foundation, Christopher and Henry Oldfield Foundation, Pears Foundation to name but a few. These offer transformative experiences to children. Their work is truly inspirational. But they can’t reach everyone. Cultural offers, particularly in the cold spots outside our big cities, are often prohibitively difficult or expensive for users to access, especially those that are particularly hard to reach.
You may recall that we have been here before in terms of a national drive towards cultural enrichment, with the Find Your Talentprogramme which started and ended with a pilot cultural offer to all children and young people in England, launched in the 2007 Children’s Plan . This comprised an entitlement to five hours per week of high-quality cultural experiences. The intention was to help ensure children and young people stayed on the path to success by participating in positive activities and experiences that develop their talents. The programme aimed to offer high quality cultural experiences to all children and young people through a more co-ordinated and coherent offer and better local area planning of provision. It was rolled out in ten pilot areas, aiming to remove barriers to access and increase choice, opportunity and the quality of the cultural offer for these areas’ entire 0-19 population. It also aimed to support local and regional economic strategies by nurturing talent and encouraging progression into employment in the creative and cultural industries. Laudable as its aims were – and still are – Find Your Talentwas short-lived, abandoned in its second year – in June 2010 – following an evaluation report which highlighted the problems of securing buy in from schools, identifying partners, engaging children and young people in design and delivery, and meeting demand. We need to learn the lessons from this pilot to make access ambitious but not unachievable. Advances in technology over the last decade mean that we are better placed now to connect, inform, explore and build partnerships but there has to be proper investment and leadership at national and local levels if we are not going to reprise past mistakes.
Many youth clubs and leisure centres have closed. Churches which were once centres of youth activity have seen a decline in participation, a trend which leaders are trying to redress through new initiatives.
But there are many groups who are still making a difference – including the Scouts. Each week over 400,000 young people and 100,000 adult volunteers take part in Scouting projects and activities at the heart of the UK's communities, often with a focus on adventure and service. We need these sorts of opportunities to be available to all young people.
And we need more adults to share their skills and talents too, strengthening fractured community bonds and being part of the village bringing up our children.
In some countries, large scale enrichment is delivered by members of the business community and other professionals, by people with particular skills and time set aside so that they can become mentors, tutors, coaches and active role models. A national campaign galvanizing citizens in such a movement could be hugely impactful. We already see these partnerships, but they need to be extended to a national systemic level.
Recently Eton Star Partnership commissioned Public First to research the economic case for enrichment. Jonathan Simons’ recently published report – Opportunity for All– examines the vast regional disparity in provision of extra-curricular activity, the strong appetite for provision and inspiring examples of activity being maintained and developed. It paints a compelling case for properly funded entitlement, and I commend it to you.
Our fourth pillar is the universal entitlement to a safe, secure childhood. This sounds so obvious as to be non-negotiable but is increasingly difficult to manage.
In the past, society has intervened to prevent children from being harmed at scale. Thus, we prohibit children from working in factories, driving cars, consuming alcohol and placing bets. We recognise that exposing children to these conditions would place them at unacceptable risk. The decision to impose age restrictions is not that we distrust parents, rather that we recognise developmental vulnerability. So, why is it that we allow children to have unfettered access to social media? Is it now time for us to consider age restriction as an appropriate response, not as a punitive measure but rather as an acknowledgement of the incontrovertible truth that is harming youngsters’ health on an industrial scale.
The most widespread threat to children’s security undoubtedly lies in the virtual world.
The latest research from the Commission into Countering Online Conspiracies in Schools confirms that this challenge is no longer confined to older pupils; primary schools are now encountering conspiracy‑laden and misleading content, reaching children at an age when their capacity to evaluate and challenge what they see is still forming.
We have taken some steps to safeguard children by banning mobile phones in schools, but the school environment is not the principal arena of concern. Our children spend far more time out of school than within it – roughly 80% of their childhood waking hours. Our children are abused daily on the online environments within their own homes. Research from Internet Matters shows that only 35-45% of parents apply, on average, parental controls to devices and social media, and this use of controls reduces as children reach their teens. Furthermore, 53% of parents report that their children have found ways to bypass these restrictions. The only realistic hope that we have of maintaining safe childhood is proper controls and accountability to be demanded of platform providers. The Online Safety Act is a foundation rather than a full solution. Fundamentally we need to challenge the tech billionaires whose fortunes are shored up by the exploitation of our children.
Of course, we should also continue to educate our children as they navigate the digital world. The Commission into Countering Online Conspiracies in Schools offers insight into the ways in which online conspiracy theories, misinformation, and disinformation are manifesting in the lives of young people, and how we can tackle this evolving issue. Training for teachers is a key aspect of the Commission’s work. Children will be taught how to critically evaluate online content to filter out inaccurate and potentially dangerous content, but the issue goes way beyond school. Schools can’t mitigate against addictive content. We have got to a position over the last decade where it is deemed acceptable to give very young children access to electronic devices. According to Ofcom, over 90% of 11 year olds in the UK own mobile phones. It’s almost seen as a rite of passage for a child to have a mobile phone when they join secondary school, and indeed schools have moved significant amounts of homework online. It isn’t the phone per se that’s the problem, it’s the chamber of horrors that can be unleashed with a couple of swipes. Alarmingly, nearly a quarter of Key Stage 1 pupils – 5 to 7 year olds – also have their own smartphones and the use of social media platforms such as TikTok, WhatsApp and Instagram is surging year on year. This trend is driven by a range of factors including targeted advertising, peer pressure and pester power. Parents who believe that having a mobile phone keeps their child safe when they are travelling home from school (because they can make rapid contact with home) have to balance the injurious impacts of cyber bullying, exploitation and unfiltered access to pornography, violence and images of self-harm which are the lived reality for many children – who may well not be sharing their viewing habits with their parents. Is this the world we want our children to inhabit?
I return to my earlier point about internal monologues. If a child is watching this content without receiving a trusted adult’s perspective, how can we expect them to make properly reasoned decisions, or maintain positive mental wellbeing? We wouldn’t expect our children to find out about water or traffic safety without our intervention so why is it acceptable to let them explore the dark corners of the web?
In the end, the move to equip very young children with technology is a matter of parental choice. For some, the tide is turning – and the upsurge in initiatives such as forest school nod to a rebalancing, but some remain convinced that denying social media channels to young children denies them opportunities to collaborate and learn within a modern digital environment. We need a national conversation grounded in evidence, in which, as adults – in all roles – we take responsibility for gatekeeping.
Which leads us to the fifth and final pillar – supporting families and addressing inclusion.
Earlier in this lecture I focused on the uneven educational achievements of disadvantaged pupils and others. Underperformance is most stubbornly entrenched amongst white working class pupils.
I have the honour of being a panel member of the Independent Inquiry into the White Working Class Educational Outcomes, which aims to understand and address the educational challenges faced by white working-class pupils in England. The Inquiry has taken evidence from different groups of stakeholders including pupils, parents and teachers. A worrying, though unsurprising initial finding is that parental engagement – and trust of the system – has been fractured. It is difficult to find a school whose mission and values don’t include listening to – and working with – parents, yet levels of dissatisfaction are rising, often linked with expectations around SEND. We seem to have got to a point where adversarial relationships – over matters such as term time holidays, behavioural expectations, uniform, homework – are eclipsing the excellent work done through active partnerships with parents, whose opinions are genuinely, sought, valued and used to influence improvement. We must be honest. Not all parents’ value education in the same way. Some doubt the importance of schools and don’t regard qualifications as being the passport to work.
Evidence from the Inquiry suggests that this is not rooted in indifference, but in lived experience. Many white working-class parents value school first and foremost as a place where their children are safe, happy and prepared for adult life. Many do not see qualifications as having reliably translated into work or opportunity in their own lives.
Parents are vital participants in our contract for childhood. The evidence is clear that pupils thrive and flourish when they experience consistency, stability and low conflict within their lives. They need support, security, boundaries and care. For a whole range of reasons, this is not their universal experience, yet the infrastructure to help parents do the difficult job of raising the next generation has been eroded.
Families have witnessed a gradual decline in community infrastructure – particularly in the disadvantaged areas where it is needed most. We need their families to feel supported with their own struggles too. Schools are uniquely placed to be the hubs for this advice and activity. We have to take the best of what was offered by Sure Start programmes – parent education, practical advice, activity groups – and recreate them for the modern age, including digital literacy within a rapidly changing world. To be truly impactful. Family Hubs need be funded, staffed and sustained at a level that addresses burgeoning need. The problem is administrative inertia – it takes so long to move from good ideas to action on the ground – structural friction and invisible resistance to doing things differently. Inertia leads to stagnation and paralysis. We have ample, incontestable data about the erosion of childhood. As adults, we have created the pressures that are making our children unhappy.
Finally, inclusion is about everyone. Our SEND system is creaking, and the very real needs of many children are not being met because they do not receive a timely diagnosis or adequate support from well qualified experts or access to settings in which they can thrive. The imperative of reforming SEND runs through all five of our pillars. Practice which improves achievement and enjoyment for the children whose challenges are most intense raises the bar for all.
I firmly believe that a social contract for childhood is achievable. Reform programmes can and do work. Our education system has improved vastly over the last few years, testifying to the vision and energy of teachers, education sector leaders and civic organisations. Our children benefit from a broader, deeper curriculum than previous generations. Evidence informed approaches mean that teaching is more engaging and effective. Partnerships between schools, businesses and universities are creating stronger pathways into meaningful careers. Multi-agency working largely protects our most vulnerable children. We can’t lose sight of these improvements.
I started with a picture of the modern, disadvantaged child.
I will conclude with a more optimistic picture of a future child for whom our social contract for childhood is the new lived reality.
Our child has enough to eat and a warm bed. They live in a house which is free from mould and infestation, in a neighbourhood which is safe and well maintained. They love school – their teachers encourage them to do their best and step in quickly if problems arise. They make friends – they are accepted for who they are. With their friends they go to clubs, play safely outside, direct their own leisure time and relish challenges. They know right from wrong and develop the character and resilience to make good choices. They have goals and ambitions and receive great support from adults – in their family, their school, the wider community – to develop their skills and talents. They will look back on their childhood with warmth and pride.
This is our aim for every child. This is our responsibility.
Thank you for listening.
