Housing can help
Brian Griffiths, chief executive, Leicester Housing Association
 

The housing sector, with its resources and influence, has a key role in supporting initiatives to help improve children's language and literacy.

Twenty years ago poor housing conditions and poverty were features more of the private rented and low-income owner-occupied sectors.  Social housing was a tenure to be aspired to for many families earning moderate incomes and certainly did not carry the stigma associated with it all too often today. Changes in Government policy over the last 20 years, including the right to buy and the shift towards market rents, changed all this. The social housing sector now includes more and more jobless, disadvantaged and vulnerable people and there has been a break up of the mixed communities that once existed on social housing estates.

To combat the increasing scale of need in these deprived communities it is vital that a more holistic approach is taken in delivering public services. There is evidence that by agencies working together, the outcomes can be much more effective, and generate far more impact than the sum of their individual contributions. This, of course, is advocated as one of the range of approaches to attacking social exclusion in the Government's national strategy for neighbourhood renewal.

It is welcome that the Government is actively trying to tackle the problem.  It took some time to get into this mess and it will take more time to get out of it. But the lesson has surely been learnt that it does no one any good to create concentrated pockets of deprivation.

As advocates of change in marginalised and excluded communities, providers of affordable housing are enthusiastically embracing the broad principles of community development and neighbourhood renewal, but links between housing and literacy have been something of an unknown and largely unexplored quantity. And it is, of course, a lot easier to carry out physical works to properties than to address the deep seated individual needs of many of our residents. I suspect the latter will have to happen over generations.

So, as landlords, why should we concern ourselves with whether or not the toddlers growing up in our homes can read? Well, firstly because it exerts a huge influence on an individual's capacity to learn - and language is about empowerment. The statistics are frightening - seven million adults in Britain are functionally illiterate, and there are nearly four million children living below the poverty line. If we are serious about social inclusion we need to give pre-school children the best possible preparation for formal education so they are able to achieve their full potential later on.

Language helps us make sense of the world around us, and is a crucial factor in developing our ability to learn in our early years and indeed throughout our lives. My eyes were opened to the rich potential of interagency working by an innovative project developed at one of Leicester Housing Association's schemes for vulnerable homeless women and children in Leicester City last year - I believe the first of its kind in the community. The Government-funded family literacy project contributed to a marked improvement in the work and motivation of the children, and in the confidence of their mothers, equipping them with skills to accelerate their offspring's learning.

Research has suggested that the first two years of a baby's learning are crucially important and that early intervention in the first few years of primary school is probably too late to make a substantial difference.

By helping parents feel more confident about reading with their children at home, it should be more possible to introduce them to further education through local providers, enhancing their own skills and knowledge.

We owe it to our existing and future customers to take an active role early on in breaking the culture of failure that undermines achievement, independence and self-respect.

As key stakeholders in our communities, we need to embrace creative collaboration with other agencies; motivated not by self-interest, but recognising that our resources and influence can help them enable others to start building better lives.

This is why, during my year as President of the Chartered Institute of Housing, I nominated a pioneering literacy project as my charity of the year. Shared Beginnings which is a Reading Is Fundamental, UK initiative helps parents develop their young children's language and learning skills.

Having visited the parents and children of one of the first groups to be set up from the appeal fund, in a village in Nottinghamshire devasted by the pit closures, and seeing the difference it is already making, individually and in the community, I know it was the right cause.
 

For more information on Shared Beginnings read the article in the March 2001 issue of Literacy Today or visit www.rif.org.uk. The CIH appeal has funded Shared Beginnings in Meden Vale in North Nottinghamshire and with the Peabody Trust in Lambeth, and has contributed to ongoing work in Newcastle with Sure Start.

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