To understand how the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted children’s experience of learning, we conducted some research through surveys and interviews. We gathered the experiences of 3,600 parents and carers, along with 1,300 children and young people, with an emphasis on the experiences of low-income households. We found that the cost burdens of school closures have fallen most heavily on families already living on a low income.
Lots of attention is given to the number of children in poverty but as a society we do not only care about the rate of poverty but also the depth of poverty. If everyone in poverty is very close to the poverty line we should perhaps worry less than when millions of people are substantially below the poverty line. A good way to measure the depth of poverty is the median poverty gap, which indicates how far below the poverty line the average family in poverty is.
Living Hand to Mouth, by Rebecca O’Connell, Abigail Knight and Julia Brannen, brings the latest research on food poverty together with the voices of children and young people experiencing food poverty first hand.
CPAG, the Church of England, Women's Aid, Turn2Us and the Refugee Council have published a new report looking at the impact of the two-child limit. An estimated 160,000 families have already been affected by the two-child limit to date; the majority are working families and the majority have just three children. More than 800,000 families and three million children could eventually be affected by it, while a third of all children will be affected in many constituencies across the country.
Universal credit: what needs to change to reduce child poverty and make it fit for families? calls for design and funding changes to improve claimants’ experience of universal credit and to reduce child poverty.