Who will do something about the following?
- Literacy: ‘An adult whose facility with language is that which would be expected from an 11-year-old’
- . 5 million UK adults (16%) do not reach this standard. Finland, Norway, South Korea achieve 100%
- A child’s score in a literacy test at the age of 7 has been shown to be a very close predictor of lifetime earnings. One in five children cannot read as well as they should by the end of primary school.
- You make more difference to the life of a child in its earliest years, than at any other time. For every £1 spent at this point in a child’s life, with childcare with qualified staff, £7 of later unnecessary expenditure is saved.
- 1% of children live in a care home – but they account for 40% of those who end up in young offender institutions. Children who used to live in care make up 25% of the prison population. (Annual cost per annum £35k per person). Germany, Norway and Denmark have alternative and much more successful models helping children who lived in care avoid offending.
Mark Roberts 