Troubling Times for Young People and Families With Troubles – Responding to Truancy,Rioting and Families Struggling With Adversity

Introduction

The UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, has described the Big Society as a means of building ‘a bigger and stronger society’ (Cabinet Office, 2010), and he identified parents and families as fundamental to achieving the aims of the Big Society. He has argued that societal renewal in the Big Society should involve ‘empowering and enabling individuals, families and communities to take control of their lives’ and emphasized the need to help ‘build a society where families and communities are stronger’, as ‘strong families are the foundation of a bigger, stronger society’ (Cameron, 2011a). Indeed, David Cameron has promised to do ‘all we can to support every family – and every kind of family’ and to be the ‘most family friendly government you have ever seen in this country’ (Cameron, 2010a), as ‘what matters most to a child’s life chances is not the wealth of their upbringing but the warmth of their parenting’ (Cameron, 2010b). However, in the wake of the August 2011 riots, which were described as ‘the worst bout of civil unrest in a generation’ (Lewis et al., 2011), the Prime Minister stated that discipline and rigour were now needed to mend the ‘broken society’, and parents need to know there will be real consequences to their inactions if their children continually misbehave (Cameron, 2011b). David Cameron blamed the riots on a lack of proper parenting, upbringing, ethics and morals (Cameron, 2011c). The Prime Minister now believes that challenging families and parents is the starting point for ‘mending the broken society’, and he identified single-parent families as a specific target, as he has judged that:

…many of the rioters…have no father at home. Perhaps they come from one of the neighbourhoods where it’s standard for children to have a mum and not a dad, where it’s normal for young men to grow up without a male role model. (Cameron, 2011d)

In addition to single-parent families, the welfare system was also identified as a source of the malaise at the heart of the broken society. David Cameron believes that the welfare system ‘encourages the worst in people…incites laziness that excuses bad behaviour that erodes self-disciple that discourages hard work…above all that drains responsibility away from people’ (Cameron, 2011d). He characterizes this as a moral hazard in our welfare system, which encourages people to behave irresponsibly as they know the state will always bail them out (Cameron, 2011d). In response to these concerns, the Prime Minister established social policy review groups to identify plans and programmes to deliver the change needed in the country. These plans would be subject to a ‘family test’ which means that ‘[i]f it hurts families, if it undermines commitment, if it tramples over the values that keeps people together, or stops families from being together, then we shouldn’t do it’ (Cameron, 2011d).

One plan that has been suggested by the social review group, and supported by the Prime Minister, is that parents of children in England who regularly truant could have their benefits cut. This is a plan which should enjoy public popularity. In August 2011, a similar proposal to financially penalize rioters and their families was made in a government e-petition, which called for rioters and their families to lose their welfare benefits and council homes. This proposal was the first e-petition to receive over 100,000 signatures (Herlihy, 2011). ¹ Conversely, an e-petition arguing that such a proposal would further isolate and unjustly punish family members who had not participated in the riots received only 19 signatures. ² Similarly, in polls conducted as part of the London School of Economics (LSE)/Guardian Reading the Riots empirical study, the most popular reasons cited by the public for the rioting were reasons of poor parenting and moral decline, whereas those people involved in the riots cited reasons associated with poverty, government policy and unemployment (Lewis et al., 2011). More recently, Michael Gove, the then Education Secretary, revived these plans to dock unpaid truancy fines from child benefit payments in response to parents who ‘fail to face up to their responsibilities’ by allowing their children to play truant (Gove, 2014).

The plan to cut benefit payments to parents in response to the truanting behaviour of their children is premised on the assumption that parents of children who truant have not accepted their responsibility and they can be made to do so by the threat of withholding benefits. The root causes of truancy, and other social problems such as youth crime and rioting, are viewed in terms of a breakdown of morality associated with dysfunctional families such as single parent families or families dependent on benefit payments. In Weberian terms, the social class most affected by this proposal will be those on the lowest incomes and most dependent on state assistance. This population has also been characterized as the ‘precariat’ (Wacquant, 2008), the urban underclass (Murray, 1990) or the population not in education, employment or training (NEET). This rationale allows for particular types of families, namely, working class and socially excluded (Gillies, 2005a, 2006, 2008), to be labelled as ‘problem families’ or ‘troubled families’ who ‘terrorize’ their communities (Parr and Nixon, 2008). Wacquant has referred to this focus on a ‘dangerous, immoral, dysfunctional underclass’ in need of urgent discipline and control as the ‘penalisation of poverty’ (Wacquant, 2001, 2009). Furthermore, Haylett has characterized the construction of working-class families as feckless and facile as a form of ‘social racism’ which is motivated by a distaste for the working classes (Haylett, 2001, 2003) and which obscures the fact that the government can be implicated in the causes of antisocial and criminal behaviour.

This article will examine the links between parenting and truancy, and other forms of antisocial behaviour such as youth offending, and question the effectiveness of removing benefits from parents as punishment for their children’s behaviour. It will examine whether the proposal to withhold benefits from parents passes the government’s own ‘family test’ by questioning whether financially penalizing low-income parents is an effective means of tackling truancy and other forms of youthful antisocial behaviour. It will consider the answer to these questions against the background of the current austerity cuts in public investment, whilst also simultaneously investing £668 million in targeting a small proportion of families deemed as ‘high risk’ under the Troubled Families Programme. The article will argue that the plan to withhold benefits from parents of children who truant represents a perpetuation of the coalition government’s narrative of an ineffectual welfare system that encourages the irresponsibility that underpins broken Britain’s social decay. This narrative fails to adequately take account of the multiple disadvantages faced by families struggling with austerity, adversity, truancy and youth antisocial behaviour.

Truancy, Youth Antisocial Behaviour and Family Life

Various research studies have found a strong link between parenting and family circumstances and the chances that a child becomes involved in behaviour such as truancy or antisocial and offending behaviour (Flood-Page et al., 2000; Graham and Bowling, 1995; Hales et al., 2009). These studies have consistently concluded that for both males and females, the odds of offending of those who truanted were more than three times greater than for those who had not truanted. Clearly there is a reciprocal relationship between offending and truancy, although it is difficult to determine which causes which, nonetheless the probability of committing offences rises considerably if truanting or excluded from school, especially permanently excluded. These studies have also emphasized that not only must the child be attending school, but the child’s experience of school, the extent to which they enjoy school, do well and achieve good results, the extent to which schools are characterized by the pupils as having poor teaching quality and a lack of clear rules can all be significant factors in preventing truancy and other antisocial behaviour (Beam et al., 2002; Crosnoe et al., 2002; Graham, 1990; Graham and Bowling, 1995; Hayward and Sharp, 2005).

Parents have an important role to play in children’s school adjustment, attendance and performance. Graham and Bowling used self-report data from a nationally representative random sample of 1721 young people in England and Wales and found that school truants usually had a poor relationship with one or both parents, family members in trouble with the law, low attachment to family and were poorly supervised in that their parents frequently did not know where their child was, whom they were with or what they were doing (Graham and Bowling, 1995). An analysis of The Millennium Cohort Study and the National Longitudinal Survey of Young People found that children aged 13 to 14 years and who live in families with five or more of the problems listed below are 36 times more likely to be excluded from school than children in families with no problems. The set of family disadvantages used are mental health, physical disability, substance misuse, domestic violence, financial stress, none of the parent in work, teenage parenthood, poor basic skills, and living in poor housing conditions (Feinstein and Sabates, 2006). Parents’ involvement in school and monitoring of school performance lessens the likelihood of truancy, school failure and associated outcomes such as offending or antisocial behaviour (Hart et al., 2007). Clearly parents have an important role to play in children’s school adjustment, attendance and performance; however, this is a complex association that is not necessarily unidirectional. But the present government has interpreted this as a causal relationship whilst simultaneously disaggregating the effects of structural factors such as poverty.

Intervening in Families to Respond to Truancy and Antisocial Behaviour

Linking Welfare, Criminal Justice Policy and Civil Society

The welfare system’s ostensible purpose is, among others, the relief of poverty and the achievement of greater economic equality in society for families and individuals (Larkin, 2007: 295). However, the process of making welfare rights increasingly conditional upon behaviour has been underway for sometime (Dean and Melrose, 1996; Novak, 1997). The communitarian agenda of Etzioni (1995) and Giddens (1994) pointed towards explanations for social problems which facilitated greater levels of individual autonomy and away from ‘orthodox subjectivism’ theory which acknowledged environmental and sociological circumstances as prime factors associated with antisocial behaviour and crime (Ramsay, 2006: 31). This agenda encouraged individuals to recognize their responsibilities to themselves, their family, communities and society in order to create strong, moral communities. These communities would consequently engender a sense of respect among their members, on which their rights should be conditional. This communitarian agenda gave primacy to individual duty and responsibility over rights (Dwyer, 1998: 495) and the expressive power of punishment as a means of reinforcing the moral order of the community. In such a context, the welfare system becomes a tool for effecting change in people’s attitudes and behaviour. The principles of universality and opportunity and the social democratic and community-based ideas associated with Beveridge have been replaced by a libertarian ideology, which views the welfare system through the prism of neo-liberalism. Accordingly, welfare benefits and services are seen as privileges that a society may bestow on its dutiful members who agree to meet compulsory duties or patterns of behaviour (Selbourne, 1994). Thus, the social welfare system is being manipulated to regulate families on benefits and compel them into behaving and parenting in a socially responsible manner (Larkin, 2007).

The penalisation of inadequate parenting also resonates with ‘new right’ underclass theories popular in the 1980s. The American social policy analyst Charles Murray argued that the state welfare system was enabling young mothers to live independently of fathers and thus increased the number of young people growing up without an appropriate male role model. These young people, it was argued, consequently turn to drugs and crime (Murray, 1984, 1990). Murray’s solution to this was to advocate the removal of state benefits. In Britain, Dennis and Erdos expounded similar views by arguing that youth antisocial behaviour, including truancy, was the inevitable result of the disintegration of the family unit and the growth of ‘fatherless families’ (Dennis and Erdos, 1992). Such views resonated strongly with political leaders, for example, Margaret Thatcher called for a return to ‘Victorian values’ in order to re-establish a sense of ‘discipline’, ‘decency’, ‘morality’ and ‘responsibility’, and reverse the tide of ‘family disintegration’ (Dennis, 1993). Similarly John Major promised to lead Britain back to a basic morality of decency, self-discipline, family values and respect for the law (Major, 1993). As shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair wrote, ‘we should never excuse the commission of criminal acts on the grounds of social conditions’ (Blair, 1994: 3), instead he characterized youth antisocial behaviour as a descent into moral chaos (Haydon and Scraton, 2000). This reflects Blair’s view that failure to accept responsibility and to respect the moral order of society justifies harsh penalties, or ‘no rights without responsibilities’, which Giddens described as a ‘prime motto’ for New Labour’s (Giddens, 1998). These views were echoed by the David Cameron when he highlighted fatherless families as one of the causes of the August 2011 riots.

The proposal to withhold benefits from parents of children who truant is not based upon a compelling and dispassionate review of the evidence, instead it is representative of the UK coalition government’s ideological commitment to reform the welfare system by ‘remoralising’ welfare recipients. This ideology is best evidenced by the Prime Minister’s Director of Strategy view that austerity represents an ideological opportunity to ‘wean the country off its apparently unbreakable dependency upon the state, centralism, welfare…the corrosive habit of half a century’ (Hilton, 2010). The plan to withhold benefits from parents of truanting children ignores the fact that the August 2011 riots occurred during school holidays and it shifts responsibility and blame for bad behaviour onto ‘troubled families’, usually working-class and/or ethnic minority families who will inevitably be the subjects of such interventions (Flint, 2009). In particular, it is mothers who will bear the brunt of this coercion as it is still predominantly mothers who take responsibility for the day-to-day care of children (Donoghue, 2011; Gillies, 2005b, 2011), and it is working-class mothers who will be positioned as familial and social failures (Gillies, 2006; Skeggs, 2004).

Thus, the August 2011 riots have created a platform for ‘state sponsored projects of social engineering on an unprecedented scale’ (Crawford, 2009). This represents what Skeggs and Loveday describe as ‘sustained social contempt’ for the working classes who are, as austerity increases, ‘cut off from investment in almost anything, are criminalized and defined as an ever more abject “feral underclass”’ (Skeggs and Loveday, 2012). Jamieson characterizes this focus on benefit withdrawal as indicative of the establishment of Wacquant’s concept of ‘social panopticism’ (Wacquant, 2001: 407), where social policy is employed as an instrument of surveillance of poor and problem populations (Jamieson, 2012). As antisocial behaviour is being branded in ‘reductive, class-based and apocalyptic terms’ (Sim, 2009: 89), less people qualify as ‘deserving’ poor anymore. Such an approach is paradigmatic of an anti-welfare rhetoric (Culpitt, 1999) that legitimizes the stigmatizing and punitive responses, which are firmly based on individual responsibility. As poverty, welfare, truancy and antisocial behaviour are linked, the poor are labelled as irresponsible and undeserving – simply to be poor and in receipt of welfare payments is to be culpable or at least vulnerable to culpability (Chunn and Gavigan, 2004). This proposal conveys the impression that every person on welfare needs to be watched and reported. These families are then coerced into conforming to normative value-laden definitions of successful, and competent, parenting that resonates most closely with the values and ambitions of white, middle-class parents. Thus, in the Big Society, particular types of family have come to embody the root cause of social ills such as truancy, delinquency and crime. Targeting and penalizing these families is a medium for preventing these problems and regulating those families who are unable, or unwilling, to conform to the moral values of the middle-class mainstream. This stigmatizing approach involves a focus on individual deficiencies and a deflection of blame from structural constraints, such as poverty, which make family life and parenting difficult (Gillies, 2005a; Hill and Wright, 2003). The social welfare system has consequently become less of a vehicle for the relief of poverty and more an instrument of education and punishment of those who rely on social security benefits (Larkin, 2007).

Troubled Young People Leading Troubled Lives

The application of underclass theories attributes causal primacy for anti-social behaviour to deficient parenting and dysfunctional families and ignores the complex, deep-rooted and multifaceted challenges that confront children who are engaging in truancy, antisocial and offending behaviour, their families and the various professionals who work with them. This approach promotes the view that poverty and structural inequality are not the source of the problem, there is no child poverty, only bad parenting is to be blamed. Many youths who truant have serious multiple problems in terms of their school achievement, psychological health and alcohol and drug abuse. Regarding the young people who appeared in court for riot-related matters, 42% of these young people were entitled to free school meals, 64% lived in one of the fifth most deprived areas and 3% lived in one of the fifth least deprived areas. Sixty-six percent were classified as having special educational needs, compared to 21% for the national average. More than 33% of young people involved in the riots had been excluded from school in the academic year preceding the riots, compared to 6% exclusions for all year-11 pupils (Ministry of Justice, 2012). The Institute of Public Policy Research found that in an overwhelming majority of the areas worst affected by the riots, youth unemployment and child poverty were significantly higher than the national average (Institute of Public Policy Research, 2011).

These figures indicate that poverty, disadvantage and educational disaffection were important characteristics of those young people involved in the August 2011 riots. The UK government’s proposal to withdraw benefits from parents of children who truant ignores the complex patterns and interrelated problems that young people endure and represents a very hard-line, moralistic and discriminatory approach to poorer parents. This approach will serve to disadvantage the most structurally vulnerable children and those families least able to cope with economic marginalization. This latest proposal also fails the government’s own ‘family test’ as it is likely to be counterproductive. It will inevitably involve schools in policing the behaviour of parents, which tends to preclude schools and parents taking a partnership approach in ensuring that not only do the children attend school, but also, they perform to the best of their ability and are nurtured to realize their potential. Similarly, the Troubled Families Programme has a strong emphasis on changing behaviour, rather than material circumstances. From the outset, the Troubled Families Programme has been criticized for using poverty indicators as the prime way of estimating the number of these families and associating poverty with antisocial behaviour (Levitas, 2012). A more subtle approach is needed than the blunt instrument of threatening parents, one which seeks to improve relationships and provides opportunities to directly tackle the underlying causes of truancy and offending behaviour. Providing families and school with support may be an effective way of preventing socially alienated and vulnerable children from truanting.

Supporting Families Experiencing Troubles

There is a need for prevention policies and interventions to avoid a narrow focus on personal and familial deficits and dysfunctions and instead take into account the social, economic and contextual factors that are frequently associated with truancy. Young people’s truancy and antisocial behaviour should be approached as a social phenomenon whose solution lies in providing non-stigmatizing support to the most disadvantaged children and their families including, for example, mentoring, speech and language therapy and educational support. In September 2003, the Green Paper on children at risk, Every Child Matters, promised a radical transformation in support services for every child whatever be their background or circumstances by encouraging service providers to focus on early intervention, effective prevention and supporting parents and carers (Chief Secretary to the Treasury, 2003). Providing high-quality services for children and their families was seen as an essential step in preparing young people for the challenges and stresses of life and giving them real opportunities to achieve their full potential. Every Child Matters followed the 1998 consultation document Supporting Families, which outlined a programme of measures to strengthen the family as the ‘foundation on which our communities, our society and our country are built’ (Home Office, 1998). Supporting Families was based on the basic principle that the interests of children were paramount, and it explicitly focused on the practical support that government policy can provide to help parents meet their responsibilities to their children. Every Child Matters identifies five key principles that now underpin all areas of service provision relating to young people – be healthy, stay strong, enjoy and achieve, make a positive contribution and achieve economic well-being. Making a positive contribution includes being involved with the community and society, engaging in positive behaviour in and out of school and not engaging in antisocial or offending behaviour (Chief Secretary to the Treasury, 2003; Department for Education and Skills, 2004). Every Child Matters emphasizes the importance of supporting parents to raise their children to achieve good outcomes. The Children Act 2004 incorporated many of the proposals from Every Child Matters and accordingly imposes a duty on children’s services to improve the well-being of children in relation to ‘the contribution made by them to society’ and to cooperate in helping children become responsible citizens. Under the overarching policy framework provided by Every Child Matters, the prevention of antisocial behaviour among young people has become one outcome objective interconnected to others that focus on various aspects of young people’s social and personal needs seeking to engage them as active citizens who can make a positive contribution to society.

The supportive and partnership approach of the Children Act 2004 is also in line with Britain’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Article 27 of the UNCRC provides for the right of every child to ‘a standard of living adequate for physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development’. Article 18 of the Convention sets out the obligations of the state to assist parents in raising their children, ‘[in order to] guarantee and promote the rights enumerated in this Convention, member states [must] provide appropriate aid to parents and legal guardians of the child in the exercise of the responsibility of raising the child’. The United Kingdom ratified the UNCRC in December 1991, ratifying states are required, as a matter of legal obligation, to protect Convention rights in their law and practice. Thus, in England and Wales, the state has a conventional obligation to safeguard and promote the general health and welfare of its youngest citizens up to their 18th birthday. The philosophy that directs the general principles of the United Nations Convention, Every Child Matters, Supporting Families and the Children Act 1989 is essentially based on the protection of the personality of all young people below 18 years of age and on the mobilization of existing resources within the community. These documents and laws recognize that sometimes parents need extra support to give them the skills and confidence to address their children’s behaviour problems and that help should be provided to families where they need it. They promote the principle that in order to reduce the risks some children face, the best strategy is to promote positive life and family experiences for all children and not to penalize families.

The government’s proposal to take child benefits away from families fails to acknowledge, let alone provide, a means to tackle the social and familial roots of truancy, crime and disorder. The image of troubled young people as ‘children in need’, which is so evident in respect of the Every Child Matters agenda, has become substituted by discourses of blame, and troubled families. In the Big Society, young people who engage in antisocial behaviour such as truancy or offending behaviour, and their families, are being denied the social rights envisaged in Every Child Matters. Social problems such as truancy have been constructed as threats to the social order, rather than as indicators of a need for support, which require tougher social and criminal justice policies designed to control and manage problem populations (Rodger, 2008). Rose characterized such constructions as exploiting a wide range of social anxieties in which certain groups are symbolized as threats to social order (Rose, 1999a: 125). The result is that the welfare system functions as a form of exclusionary social control in which the potential threat can be contained (Rose, 1999b: 240). Instead what is needed is a redistributive politics rather than a social policy of intervention ‘to improve the poor’ (Armstrong, 2004: 106).

Diminished Spending on Families

In effect, the proposal to withdraw benefits from families has engendered what has been characterised as a ‘blurring, widening and masking’ (Squires, 2006) process integral for the ‘criminalisation of social policy’ (Crawford, 1999; Muncie and Hughes, 2002; Rodger, 2008; Wacquant, 2001: 407) which promotes anti-welfarism and masks decreased public spending (Jamieson, 2012). By 2017, the United Kingdom is set to have the lowest share of public spending among major capitalist economies, including the United States, as a result of the exceptionally harsh cuts in public spending currently planned (Taylor-Gooby, 2012). One consequence of these cuts in spending will be the deepening of pre-existing social inequalities (Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2010) accompanied by predictions of a new ‘lost generation’ (MacDonald, 2011) and an estimated 3 million children living in poverty in the United Kingdom by 2015 (Brewer et al., 2011). The Children’s Commissioner for England reported in June 2013 that a further 500,000 more children would be forced into poverty by 2015 as a result of the current spending cuts, tax policies and benefit changes, with the poorest children the worst hit by welfare reforms (Office of the Children’s Commissioner, 2013). The 2013 Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion report found that for the first time since the foundation of the welfare state, more people in working families are living below the poverty line than those in workless families and concluded that poorer families are under more pressure than ever before (MacInnes et al., 2013). Prior to the August 2011 riots, the coalition government stressed its belief that strong and stable families of all kinds are the bedrock of a strong and stable society (HM Government, 2010: 19) and expressed commitment to a ‘whole family’ approach to families with multiple and complex problems (Kendall et al., 2010). However, in the aftermath of the riots, there was a reduction in local authority spending ranging from 6% to 25%, with an average of 13%, on youth services, early years and children’s centres which has resulted in the closure of more than 400 Sure Start centres throughout the country (4Children, 2012). A report by UNISON has found that 2000 youth workers have been axed and 350 youth centres closed since 2012. As a result, 41,000 youth service places and 35,000 hours of outreach work by youth workers have been lost. This equates to at least £60 million of funding withdrawn from youth services due to centrally imposed local government budget reductions (UNISON, 2014).

Support for children with speech, language and communication needs has also become harder to access as a result of significant cuts to front-line speech and language therapy services and to the specialist advisory teaching services on which parents and children depend. These cuts coincide with a 58% increase in the past 5 years in the numbers of school-age children with speech, language and communication needs (Gross, 2011). The British Medical Association has criticized the lack of mental health services for adolescents and teenagers struggling with alcohol and drug addiction (British Medical Association, 2003). The Association for Young People’s Health found that 13% of boys and 10% of girls aged 11–15 years have a diagnosable mental health disorder, but only 25% of these young people have access to the services they need (Hagell et al., 2013). YoungMinds and Transition to Adulthood Alliance found that young people in the criminal justice system are being seriously failed by inadequate and ineffective mental health provision (YoungMinds and Transition to Adulthood Alliance, 2013). They found that young people only gain access to mental health support and services for ‘severe and debilitating’ mental illness. When they do get help, it was usually in the form of medication. However, following prescription, young people often went long periods of time with no review or ongoing support. The study found that despite a plethora of policy initiatives over the past 20 years designed to improve services for young people with mental health problems at risk of or engaged in offending behaviour, very little improvements have filtered through to young people who report many of the same problems that were experienced by young people 20 years ago. Furthermore, Clinks and the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services have highlighted the impact of cuts on the voluntary and community sector (Clinks, 2012; National Council for Voluntary Youth Services, 2011). They found that in 2011, over 80% of organizations had experienced a reduction in income, which has led to the voluntary and community sector being ‘in an increasingly fragile state as a result of funding cuts and a simultaneous increase in demand for its services’. A troubling example of this is provided by the National Youth Reference Group who found that low economic growth, wide-ranging changes to the welfare system and cuts in public spending on youth services have resulted in more young people becoming homeless (Homeless Watch, 2012). Organizations and services that young people need are being closed because of funding cuts and not all local councils have suitable emergency accommodation for young people.

These levels of state resourcing risk leaving many children and families with inadequate levels of support and legitimizing the greater use of compulsion such as threats, fines and imprisonment. The implication is highly class-specific as the well-off are able to use their resources to achieve the best outcomes for their children whilst the poorer sections of society receive less support and are instead responsibilized and penalized (Gillies, 2012). These cuts are happening against the backdrop of the government investing £200 million to turn around the lives of troubled families who represent 1% of the total population of families. The amount of money taken away from the poorest families as a result of the cuts discussed above far outweighs the amount invested in the Troubled Families Programme (Levitas, 2014). However, even this £200 million depends upon measurable progress being made, and it comprises only 40% of the funding needed. Overstretched local authorities will still need to find £675 million at a time when they are being forced to slash their budgets. The Troubled Families Programme will only pay out once per family and then offers no further financial incentive to the local authority to continue working with these families, should the family subsequently experience problems or need support.

Evidence also suggests that those most in need of support are the least likely to access it. Analysis from the Millennium Cohort Study showed that poorer families were less likely to receive a visit from health visitors than those families with higher incomes (Feinstein and Sabates, 2006). Feedbacks from parenting programmes such as Webster Stratton’s Incredible Years and Triple P show that parents value extra support such as parenting classes. Yet not all parents who need these services can access them, the principle of progressive universalism is not yet being met with respect to support for parents (Leung et al., 2006). The Child Poverty Review identified a number of potential barriers to engagement of those most in need of support: a fear or mistrust of statutory services and concerns that children’s services might take away children from parents if they are seen to have problems (HM Treasury, 2004). Many services are perceived to cater for ‘failed’ or ‘struggling’ families, and this stigma may deter parents from accessing support that they know is available. There is a lack of readily accessible information about what services are available. Parents may recognize they need some support, but they do not know where to get help (HM Treasury and Department for Education and Skills, 2007). For families with multiple problems, fines will not work nor will they address many of the reasons why some children are missing school, such as a child who is missing school because they are being bullied or because they are struggling to catch up with their peers.

Conclusion

The government’s proposal to remove child benefits from parents of young people who truant will penalize and marginalize the most disadvantaged and vulnerable in the country despite David Cameron’s promise to do ‘all we can to support every family – and every kind of family’ (Cameron, 2010a). This proposal reduces the responsibility of society, encourages a blaming culture that does not take account of the full circumstances, and will result in ineffective punitive sanctions. The problems confronting young people and their families are no longer defined as social but instead are seen as resulting from poor choices made by ‘uninformed, unmotivated, incompetent or irresponsible individuals’ (Crawford, 2009: 814). As Slater argues:

emotive terms, phrases and concepts have been strategically deployed…to give the impression that “welfare” is a lifestyle choice made by dysfunctional families despite the fact that considerable social scientific evidence shatters that impression. (Slater, 2014).