Ideas@TheCentre
Overcoming poverty of ambition
Sometimes studying social policy can be thoroughly depressing. There’s child abuse. There’s domestic violence. There are bad schools, community breakdowns, and generations of unemployment.
But every now and then, something emerges to remind us that we’re not doing too badly after all.
Last week at the Australian Institute of Family Studies annual conference, the Brotherhood of St Lawrence’s Janet Taylor presented a snapshot of the findings from the ‘Life Chances’ longitudinal study. Since 1990, this study has followed a group of 140 Melbourne children.
This snapshot looked at the 10 children who were most disadvantaged at the time of their birth. Their parents were often unemployed or unable to speak English, and all had very low incomes.
At the beginning of the presentation, the audience was asked to write down how many children we thought would still be in this highly disadvantaged group by the time they were 18. Cynically, I thought that eight of the 10 most disadvantaged babies would still be in this category by the time they reached adulthood.
In fact, eight had moved out of this group. They had finished secondary school, and many were now attending university.
Interestingly, the eight children who had begun their lives in extreme disadvantage but ended up performing ‘better than average’ at school were children of new migrants. Their experiences were quite different to the disadvantaged Australian-born children who were more likely to remain disadvantaged.
It’s hard to know what lessons can be drawn from this. It’s only a small sample. Across the wider study, educational outcome was quite strongly related to a family’s socio-economic status.
Nevertheless, the results remind us that children of the poorest parents – both in terms of income and education – can go on to become tomorrow’s doctors and lawyers. While they face a much steeper climb and encounter many more hurdles than their more affluent peers, these results are a reminder that Australia is in many ways a very mobile society.
Maybe it also demonstrates that in a wealthy country like Australia, the most damaging kind of poverty is not lack of income but lack of aspirations. Perhaps the new migrant parents told their children that with hard work and dedication, it was within their power to create better lives for themselves. Perhaps the Australian-born parents, disillusioned after years in the welfare system, did not do the same?
It suggests that more of the focus of our social policy efforts should be on addressing this most destructive kind of poverty – poverty of ambition.
Jessica Brown is a Policy Analyst at the Centre. She attended the 11th annual Australian Institute of Family Studies conference in Melbourne last week.
