This report from the Social Justice Policy Group, chaired by Iain Duncan Smith, identifies five 'pathways' to poverty and makes proposals for tackling them. These pathways are: educational failure, family breakdown, economic dependence, indebtedness and addictions. A sixth section considers how the third sector might be better supported to help people escape poverty. Here we concentrate on those pathways that the National Literacy Trust (NLT) judges to have the most relation to literacy: educational failure and family breakdown. In each case we provide a summary of the proposals and a response that considers the NLT's role in fulfilling them.

Educational failure

The policy proposals fall under three main headings: 'Every parent matters', 'Better school leadership' and 'Creating a culture of learning'.

Every parent matters

This theme focuses on:

Responsibility – every school to have a 'Home-school charter' setting out the rights and responsibilities of parents, teachers and children.

Involvement – 'Be a credit to your child' courses, targeted at deprived areas, to show parents how children learn and how they can help. They would be run by the school or local alternative providers and would build on the pre-school support proposed in the family breakdown report (below).

Support – 'Home-school support champions' to work full-time in schools in deprived areas, helping parents to support their children's education. These would be members of the local community and would focus on engaging with parents and identifying the issues underlying children's poor behaviour and attainment, tackling children's and parents' needs at an early stage – including referring them to family literacy provision.

Empowerment – parents of disadvantaged children who fulfil their obligations under the Home-school charter and attend a 'Be a credit to your child' course would be eligible for a £500 per year credit to be spent on extra tuition, which could include extra literacy support.

Parental and third sector groups would also have greater powers to set up new schools, called 'Pioneer schools'. Parents of children at poorly-performing schools would have freedom to move their child (with the funding for that pupil) to another state school if their school failed to improve over a three-year period.

Better school leadership

Proposals to reduce bureaucracy for head teachers include creating a 'Disadvantaged primary school personnel fund' (to reduce the administrative burden on heads and to increase their pay) and improving head teacher training (including through an MA qualification in leading schools in deprived areas).

Creating a culture of learning

This theme has three key objectives: universal literacy and numeracy, improved pupil behaviour and an engaging curriculum that increases love of learning. The report makes the following proposals:

Family literacy classes – much greater use of these is proposed, at both pre-school level (through the 'Family service hubs' recommended under the family breakdown proposals) and through primary schools.

Booster classes for pupils falling behind – specialised literacy and numeracy teams would provide these for children falling behind in English and maths. Reading Recovery is an example of an approach that could be taken.
The report highlights the following features of successful literacy programmes:

• Individual mentoring
• Parental involvement
• Early intervention
• Small, specialist groups for under-achieving pupils
• Expert tuition from specialist teachers, assistants and volunteers from the community, including third sector groups

Improving pupil behaviour – through more alternatives to Pupil Referral Units, including specialist programmes on the school site and the expansion of funds for third sector providers, and through managing the transition from primary to secondary school more carefully. The report cites evidence [1] that poorly behaved children are more likely to have problems with literacy and numeracy, as well as to come from disadvantaged families, to be bored with academic work and lacking in confidence and enthusiasm, and to suffer disruption in the transition to secondary school. It also points out that improving family involvement and literacy skills may be to no avail if this transition is poorly managed, and that courses for parents, home-school support workers and family learning activities could be methods of improving the transition period.

Pathways to success – more vocational and practical options should be available for secondary school pupils, so increasing their confidence, communication skills, literacy and numeracy skills (as these are built into practical tasks, allowing young people to understand their usefulness) and other qualities valued by business.

Building better links with business and the community – a much more significant role is envisaged for the third sector in supporting literacy and numeracy. More tax relief could encourage investment and involvement in schools from local businesses and individuals.

The report also highlights some characteristics of the successful schools its authors visited in the UK and abroad. These include:

• A strong emphasis on literacy and numeracy, including regular assessments and extra support for pupils who are struggling.
• Fostering a love of reading.
• Encouraging reading at home with parents.
• Engaging families (including the extended family) in the life of the school as much as possible (eg encouraging grandparents to be library assistants) to reinforce the message that education is a key part of family life.
• Encouraging pupils to take personal responsibility for their own lives and not be trapped by their circumstances – through raising their expectations and fostering habits of diligence, thoroughness and self-discipline.

Role of the NLT

The NLT's vision is of a society where everyone has the reading, writing, speaking and listening skills that they need to fulfil their potential. We therefore welcome the proposals within this report for strengthening the literacy skills of children and their parents, and believe that we can contribute through:

• Fostering a love of reading. The NLT believes that it is not enough to focus on skills improvement alone, and that helping people to discover that reading is enjoyable is a way of helping them both to improve their skills and to discover an intrinsic motivation for further learning. The National Reading Campaign, Family Reading Campaign, Reading Connects, Reading Champions, Reading Is Fundamental, UK (RIF), Reading The Game and the Vital Link all work to further this aim. Reading Connects, in particular, works to support schools in building their own whole-school reading culture, which underpins a culture of learning.
• Promoting reading in the home and community. Literacy is not just an issue for those directly involved in schools and education. The proposed 'Be a credit to your child' and family literacy courses would offer opportunities to strengthen reading at home, and any development of these should build on the experience and expertise in these areas that already exists across the UK. The NLT website provides details of programmes, examples of practice and evidence from research. Home-school support champions, if trained, would also be ideal intermediaries for reaching out to parents who might struggle with literacy but be wary of educational settings. The Family Reading Campaign, Reading Connects (eg through the family involvement toolkit), Reading Champion Dads, the Vital Link's 'Got kids? Get reading!' materials and RIF's family activity packs all provide ideas and resources for work with parents.
• Providing evidence of successful approaches. The Family Reading Campaign features many case studies of work to help families read together. The Literacy and Social Inclusion Project collected evidence of successful approaches to developing the reading, writing and communication skills of children and of disaffected young people, which can also contribute to the goal of improving behaviour.

Family breakdown

The report identifies the roots of family breakdown as dysfunction, dissolution and dadlessness. Six objectives lie behind its proposals for tackling these: the following is a summary.

Better facilitate family stability and minimise family breakdown by encouraging healthy family relationships

A small percentage of government money is spent on the prevention of family breakdown in comparison with the cost it incurs on society and with remedial provision. Service provision is geared towards helping people post-separation, rather than doing all that is possible to prevent breakdown from happening in the first place.

It is most helpful to see measures to prevent, and alleviate the effects of, family breakdown as a continuum at both the individual and family level: anticipating or identifying difficulties early, providing appropriate support to tackle problems as early as possible, and then more specialist support where problems are severe or the family unit has broken down.

Proposals include a national relationship and parenting education scheme, offering universal and targeted support at key life stages: pre-marriage; ante-natal; parenting of 0-5s, 5-11s and teens; lone parenting; prison families; military families; and care families.

Build relational competence

Prisoners are especially disadvantaged in this area, but research shows that re-offending rates are far lower among young men who form lasting relationships upon completing their sentences.

Breaking the cycle of disadvantage is essential in view of the fact that 25% of young offenders are already fathers and 45% of prisoners lose contact with their families while 'inside'.

Focus on the first three years of children's lives and assist families during other periods of vulnerability (which may be prolonged eg when disability is a factor)

The nurture received by a child in the first 36 months can have lifelong consequences for mental health. Parents from dysfunctional families often struggle to provide this, perpetuating disadvantage.

Proposals include the creation of 'Family service hubs'. These would be similar to the current children's centres but with less focus on childcare and more on community-based service provision, including through third sector providers. Their aim would be support for parents during children's first three years, with an enhanced role for health visitors in supporting children's cognitive and emotional development. Intensive home-visiting programmes should be implemented as a matter of priority.

Enhanced support and training for professionals is also proposed. This would include the application of a coherent model of family support.

Maximise community-level support and minimise dependence on the state

Extended family relationships are weaker than in the past and the state provides little support for them to flourish – for example, childcare arrangements are biased away from informal care from close relatives and towards formal state provision. Parenting and relationship support could be far more grounded in local communities, with voluntary and community sector providers making a much greater contribution than they do at present, thus shifting away from the current bias towards professional service provision, where appropriate.

Send the message that every family matters, an essential complement to the more usual 'every child matters'

The current emphasis on the parent-child relationship ignores a crucial dimension of child well-being, ie the couple relationship. In addition, too many fathers are missing out on an essential facet of adulthood – the need to be actively engaged in raising the next generation. Policy needs to encourage their involvement in their children's lives.

Create a positive policy bias in support of marriage

There are marked discrepancies in the stability of married and cohabiting couples. To help combat family breakdown, marriage should be recognised in both official terminology and in the tax system.

Role of the NLT

The NLT's work contributes to building stronger families through:

• Encouraging the attachment of parents to their babies, through the Talk To Your Baby campaign.

• Encouraging bonding between different family members, through talking together as promoted by Talk To Your Baby, and through reading together as promoted by the Family Reading Campaign and RIF.

• Encouraging fathers to spend quality time with their children by talking and reading together, and to be involved in their children's education through supporting their literacy development, as promoted by Talk To Your Baby, Reading Champion Dads, the Family Reading Campaign and Reading The Game. Reading activities can also support fathers in prison to remain involved in their children's lives and education, and Prison Reading Champions encourages male prisoners to be reading role models for other prisoners and their own children.

• Providing information, advice and resources for developing early language and literacy to professionals who work with families (including health professionals), through Talk To Your Baby, the Family Reading Campaign and the NLT website. Should the proposal for Family service hubs be implemented, we would promote this work to the hubs. Should the proposal to increase the roles of the voluntary sector and the extended family in supporting families be implemented, we would also increasingly promote its messages through these routes.

• Promoting a strategic, area-wide approach to supporting reading in the home and community. Should the proposal for a strategic approach to family support be implemented, the NLT would promote support for literacy as an aspect this – using the different agencies that have contact with families, as well as libraries, national initiatives such as Bookstart, and the voluntary sector.

1 Miles, S. B. and Stipek, D. (2006) Contemporaneous and longitudinal associations between social behavior and literacy achievement in a sample of low income elementary school children. Child Development 77 pp 103-117.