‘Children born into circumstances of poverty and lone parenthood are particularly unlikely to do well in education and beyond.’
from Chapter 1, ‘Challenging Inequalities’ by Paul Johnson
It's now over fifty years since Sir Keith Joseph stated this ambition to ‘break the cycle of deprivation’, but the situation today is every bit as bad as it was then — indeed worse. As Paul Johnson describes in his new book, ‘Challenging Inequalities’, he not only shows how levels of income and wealth inequality have increased significantly over the past decades but also refers to the challenge in family structures.
The Centre for Social Justice report ‘Lost Boys’ set out this issue in 2025, and last week's NEET report from UCL shows the extent of this problem graphically. Meanwhile, the Office for National Statistics has also reported a consistent rise in the percentage of young people aged 20-34 living in their parental home, where that option is open to them: that's over a third of young men, compared with a fifth of young women.
These statistics convey the challenge for young people right across society, but they are particularly acute for those suffering real disadvantage in terms of low income and broken families. Young people in care experience particularly high levels of insecurity and isolation and, dependent on their local authority’s policy towards adult care leavers, they can experience a real cliff-edge as their residential arrangements draw to a close following their adolescence.
At least in the United Kingdom we have strategies designed to make this transition as calm as possible: for example, Children's Minister Josh MacAlister is exploring ways in which each adult care leaver can have at least two reliable adults as points of reference.
Meanwhile, the challenges overseas are now coming right to our doorstep as huge numbers of young people from nations suffering both poverty and disruption seek safe havens throughout Europe, including in the United Kingdom.
So, what are the key ingredients needed to break the cycle of deprivation? It obviously helps hugely to have a stable family environment but, as we've said above, so often that's not possible.
Our work at The Share Foundation has led us to a new strategy of providing resources and life skills which are essential for turning the dial from a ‘poor me’ attitude to looking ahead: this is a crucial transformation.
For young people in care throughout the United Kingdom, The Share Foundation has delivered this for the Department for Education for the past fourteen years: it's moved a long way beyond simply setting up accounts for young people. One of the most formative experiences was to take inspiration from the strategy developed by microfinance, which uses a combination of loan finance and community relationships in order to achieve attitudinal and educational change, in a way that simply cannot be delivered through grants.
Taking inspiration from Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Foundation and former Chief Adviser of Bangladesh, we developed the concept of incentivised learning for these very disadvantaged young people so that they could ‘earn as they learn’. We learnt from the microfinance experience that grants, which are the automatic resort for Government in delivering welfare support, represent ‘being fed for a week’ compared to a focused learning experience which teaches ‘how to feed yourself for a lifetime’.
As a result, this has brought about a response of persistence, which is just not possible as a result of presenting webpages on financial education or printed materials for distribution through local authorities. You should bear in mind that many young people in care have experienced schooling to be every bit as disruptive as their residential life.
We've now seen over two and a half thousand young people take this incentivised learning programme which we call Stepladder Plus, and the impact on reducing the NEET rates for these adult care leavers is clear: we estimate that it’s already saved over £12 million in welfare benefits projected to cover the lifetime cost of NEET status. We’re now working with Sussex University in order to provide quantitative research on this, and there's a real focus on local authorities which have endorsed our approach enthusiastically, including Essex, Staffordshire, Liverpool, Cardiff, Sheffield, Bradford, Barnet, Cumbria, Swansea, etc.. Meanwhile, the Scottish Government provides half of the cost of the incentivised learning process in that country: a real encouragement to the English, Welsh and Northern Irish Governments to do likewise.
A real threshold in the six-step course is Step 4, where we ask young people aged 15-17 to write 250-500 words setting out their hopes and plans for the future. Their responses are truly inspirational, and we look forward to analysing them methodically in order to demonstrate the attitudinal transformation that has taken place by this stage in the course.
At Cambridge, this approach is known ‘as non-experimental evaluation’: that is, rolling up our sleeves and getting on with the job, and letting the research accompany, rather than precede, that process. Of course, it helps to have philanthropic support in order to make this possible — it’s provided the majority of the £1.7 million cost of incentives so far — but that’s not an insurmountable barrier. The British Bankers’ Association demonstrated that by donating over £400,000 a couple of years ago to enable coverage throughout the United Kingdom for incentivised learning.
The next step should be to take some of these techniques for attitudinal transformation and see if we can get them working in those countries suffering real poverty and disadvantage. This would not be The Share Foundation's role — it's a UK-centric charity. But I hope that Share Alliance can build on its ‘non-experimental evaluation’ research in order to show how we can break the cycle of deprivation overseas as well as in the United Kingdom.
Obviously, we don't have a global Department for Education to help set out the regulations and structure: that's a challenge, although I'm aware that some countries such as India have made great progress in this respect. We'll hear more about that from Professor Matthew Agarwala at the inter-generational rebalancing conference next week.
But let's imagine that a major international media organisation such as CNN was prepared to help set these arrangements in place. They have access to huge numbers of wealthy philanthropists among their first world audience, while at the same time having close relationships with corporate banking clients in Africa such as Afrexim and Zenith.
If they were able to link this access to wealth participation with organised structures for delivering resources and life skills empowerment for young people from really disadvantaged backgrounds, imagine the change that could be achieved — and all without having to rely on the United Nations for administration.
The problem is that governance bodies, whether national or international, are all so short-termist in their perspective; and they are so vulnerable to collapsing support from national governments, such as we’ve seen with the cuts in overseas aid budgets of the United States and the United Kingdom.
This is why we do need to think outside the box in order to achieve results; the more direct we can make the link between the sources of money and the outputs for disadvantaged young people, the better. It's what I describe as ‘disintermediation’ and it’s why I yearn to see the hypothecation of inheritance taxes for inter-generational rebalancing — it's currently hard to detect this happening anywhere across the world.
If there was a constitutional requirement to ring-fence these levies for the benefit of disadvantaged young people, huge numbers of wealthy individuals (such as the family of Samsung's late chairman Lee Kun-hee) approaching their final days would feel much more positive about setting aside some of their assets for this purpose (in Samsung’s case that’s $8 billion). It’s what I describe as the ‘Black Hole of Economics’, and it's why the inter-generational rebalancing conference is so important.
A presumption in favour of egalitarianism is not the same thing as seeking to abolish inequalities: it is positive rather than negative, and it seeks to deliver its aim as a result of providing individual opportunity for all. It seeks a more equitable and fairer world, but without removing the ability for people to achieve their potential in life.
If you believe that everyone deserves a chance to vote, go to school, get a good job, and participate in society, then you are an egalitarian. When laws seek to make life fairer, they are becoming more egalitarian. So when you see the word ‘egalitarian’, think about the combination of equality and freedom of the kind to which Thomas Jefferson referred when he said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
We should not give up hope for a logical and long-term approach to break the cycle of deprivation. Just because government profligacy has thoroughly destabilised public finances, it doesn't mean that we should turn our backs on the need to move towards a more equitable world. The challenge is that we've seen failure to deliver from both the socialist left and the capitalist right: we need to think afresh about how to achieve Thomas Jefferson's vision for all, in a way that is genuinely egalitarian.
There will be a good opportunity to explore concepts such as these in more depth at the inter-generational rebalancing conference on 14th/15th May at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London, and Paul Johnson himself will be speaking on Friday afternoon 15th May. In-person attendance is free of charge: please book now, at www.sharefound.org/conference , and it is now possible to register for webinar participation (which is also free of charge). The various presentations will be available after the event on YouTube and on Share Radio’s Share Sounds podcast library.
Gavin Oldham OBE
Share Radio