Social Exclusion Housing.
Minorities may often effectively be excluded from obtaining reasonable work, education, or holidays etcetera or general equal opportunity and fair treatment - and at the worst extreme a society may treat some minorities as social Lepers and/or social or political Scapegoats. Social exclusion harms those concerned, and the children especially who seeing that society has no love for them become anti-social - harming all of a society greatly. But can middle-class run governments and charities ever learn how to best deal with the poor and other minorities ? Elections and the media mostly ignore these major issues.
Disadvantaged school children
This homepage is devoted to the 'problem children' of developed countries like the UK and USA. 18 years of raising my children on a large housing estate with many poor and socially excluded families, and using its local state schools, taught me much about disadvantaged school children from socially excluded estate sub-societies that our non-street-wise middle-class professionals running government departments, media, charity and other bodies and most academics know little if anything about. I learned more than from my 1987 UK City University of London sociology and economics honours degree or my working 14 years in social housing, of poverty UK style. Hopefully poverty and social exclusion will be abolished in 20 years time or 200 years time or never, but some real progress can and must be made now - bit by bit. Where the poor or other minorities become socially excluded, they get treated unfairly not only by government but then also by most of the population. (eg. as anti-semitism by Nazi governments spreads to their populations) And, even in richer countries, times like Christmas see many socially excluded children get almost nothing and feel badly let down.
Education Education Education.
1. The almost disenfranchised millions scandal.
Many poor UK children get few if any holidays, and especially not the foreign holidays that most UK children now get. On 3 occasions I booked holidays abroad for myself and my 2 sons, and my elder son backed out at the last minute claiming school exam pressures. Each time I offered a free foreign holiday to 4 or 5 of my younger sons estate friends most of whom get no holidays and very much wanted to take up my offer. Amazingly, all of my offers were refused because these poor children simply have no passports.UK government then charged the poor for passports at £51 adult £34 child plus £7 for the birth certificates needed. For a poor couple with 3 children this totals an impossible £239 and by 2024 this had increased to £353 !
Two of my younger sons estate friends did get a holiday one year, a joint multi-family local shared caravan holiday booking. One family backed out of it and my sons were invited as replacements, so I supplied adequate money and that was a simple enjoyed holiday. But I remain furious that poor children cannot accept offers of free foreign holidays as UK passport charges are disgracefully socially exclusive. It is entirely unnecessary, as it need cost nothing to give the poor free passports and add 10% to the cost for others. Instead millions of UK poor have no passport and are left to wonder if they are real citizens. This does not encourage children to develop into model citizens, and applies to a number of developed countries.
NEWS. Current UK government plans only involve increasing the cost of passports to the poor ! Presumably with the approval of their silent Social Exclusion Unit (or now Social Exclusion Task Force) 'experts' and new Minister for Children ? Even if the poor can somehow save the money for passports, their doctors mostly had countersigned their applications have recently been stopped from doing so ! And the other middle-class professionals who alone are supposedly allowed, largely will not do so either and the British poor mostly now cannot get passports other than illegally. Of course in fact, the middle class professionals in developed countries like the UK are unlikely to know much of the actual problems that can really plague their poor children. They could carefully study this site.
Times are changing, and now laws make it unsafe to offer a holiday or anything else to poor children or their parents in many countries. There seems to have been no study done on the resulting decreasing community aid for poor children, and income studies exclude this. Hopefully plans for big charges for new compulsory ID cards will exclude the poor ? The average UK child now gets about 2 holidays per year with one distant mostly foreign, and the poorest children should get at least a sixth of that. In some developed countries, foreign holidays are or have been much less common than in the UK now and the passport issue then is not a social exclusion issue. Charities in developed countries often do little for their own poor children, but one good small UK charity is the Family Holiday Association, though unfortunately they don't accept direct applications from poor families.
January 2010 news headlines included a UK government minister publicly admitting for the first time that UK middle-class governments have not understood the UK poor.
But August 2010 saw a new UK government Deputy Prime Minister supporting the old unhelpful view that 'poverty affects children little if they have good parenting'. This despite a 2010 Warwick University study showing that poverty, even alone, does have at least some very bad effects on children. (reported at http://uk.news.yahoo.com/4/20100903/tuk-poverty-affects-white-pupils-the-har-dba1618.html)
2. A fair days pay for a fair days school.
UK children who find school attendance a problem are mostly from the poorest families and especially those socially excluded living on large social housing estates. Often their parents did badly at school but feel that they have done OK in life, on welfare and whatever, 'proving that school does not matter'. Many estate parents believe such nonsense, and their children believe them. Such children can also convince non-poor friends of this, so they also come to see learning as 'uncool'. These children will truant, and/or will attend and avoid learning, and this will largely start when they start secondary school or high school at about aged 11. Helping to turn around these secondary children will help ALL secondary children, instead schools tell parents their non-learning kids are doing fine and give them 'average' exam results.Government needs to realistically demonstrate to such children that their school attendance does really matter. Secondary school has become like children's initiation into adulthood, but with school systems providing adult sticks and no adult carrots. Poor parents can't give their kids rewards for good behaviour or learning. Democratic governments may increase exam pressures on children, and make their going to college mean debt, to win votes for themselves - and give children nothing but 'jam when you are grown up' promises. For increasing numbers of older children in modern developed countries this cannot work, and I do not believe that it is good for any child today. The Information Age and Rights Age is forcing children to grow up faster in some ways, but developed societies have generally not produced the completed process. Older children treated ridiculously by governments will increasingly react against it badly. The young are often the most disbelieving of 'education' by government or by parents so actually maltreating them while telling them they are being treated fairly will not work but turn them to gangs, crime, drugs, violence and even guns. Some relevant actual fairness is actually needed.
Children entering secondary school need to be paid a 'fair days pay' more like an adult. They could easily be paid their Child Benefit at secondary school at the end of each Friday for their first year, and then into accounts depending on school attendance. Child Benefit given to parents is often a waste as too many estate mothers cease to even feed their older children expecting them to find their own food or money, but child benefit paid to all children of secondary school age could re-inspire UK society from its base. That carrot would encourage all children's improved school attendance, their valuing school and their characters, and it is really needed. Poorer parents might fear losing their Child Benefit, but most responsible children earning Child Benefit by their school attendance would proudly hand it to mum for their keep like an adult. Post-16 would need a higher rate. The only other carrot that really works is where secondary schools have good provision for all on children's hobbies (like football, martial arts, video gaming ?), some of which can be in lunch times or after school - but few UK secondary schools do much in this area at all these days and national curriculum sports are a badly discouraging confused mix of everything that can inspire no child.
Governments have come up with actually jailing parents for their children's truancy, eviction from their housing for their children's misbehaviour, excluding children from school and pressuring teachers - new anti-child ultrasonic sirens are even being trialed in the UK, said to be ear-splitting to children but can't be heard by adults, to drive children off the streets !
Some real carrot is clearly also needed here for complete 21st century children, a fair days pay for a fair days school and it need cost governments of developed countries little. (If governments cannot see their way to implementing child benefit for children, then some big housing estates could do with enhanced charity soup-runs to help keep children from crime - though I see that as a much less satisfactory answer. My youngest son did basically turn our estate flat into a drop-in for poor estate children and that may well have helped some a little, but I am sure that such charity answers are nowhere near as good as our child benefit policy.) This child benefit payment system would require children to be seen in school, not required at present, and this would also reduce child benefit fraud. And the age of starting secondary school could also be used for other things, like the age of criminal responsibility and part-time working perhaps, to make it a real development milestone with parents encouraged to have a young adulthood celebration....more->
The need for affordable housing
In many countries, acceptable housing cannot be afforded by the low-incomed unless low rent or low price 'affordable housing' or 'social housing' is made available. Developers of new social housing face a financial problem examined on this site of somehow subsidising their rents or sale prices with housing grants or by using cheaper prefab housing or by private housing development contributing to affordable housing development.
Social housing development grants will need successful bidding strategies appropriate to the bidding situation as in England UK. English grant funding now favours fewer bigger developers, with strong grant bidding competition for housing grant. And needed new affordable housing will generally only be given grants if developers, subsidy providers and others involved are satisfied that a proposed new development project is financially viable and is good value for money.
Some regions may get excessive demand for affordable housing while others get unsustainable low demand, as when social rents are set way below low-market rents in some locations and close to low-market rents in other areas especially where low-income families face relocation difficulty that prevents natural corrections from working.
Social housing development for the low-incomed will tend towards concentrating unemployed, welfare dependant and problem families in a disadvantaged socially excluded sub-society. This often involves housing problems involving non-sustainability in developed countries like the UK - needing appropriate social inclusion strategies.
If you have dire youth/child handling problems then try Youth Change ! (but their large web pages may load slowly)
Or for UK poorer families maybe look at The Family Holiday Association.
Or SEE an interesting science website with Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, William Gilbert and more ?
otherwise, if you have any view or suggestion on the content of this site, or seek any advice on this area, do contact :- Social Exclusion Housing Vincent Wilmot 166 Freeman Street Grimsby N.E.Lincs DN327AT UK.
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