Child Poverty

Lord Kestenbaum Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kestenbaum (Lab)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Lister for securing this vital debate. The Government’s strategy on child poverty should inspire the nation. It has mobilised us all in common cause around what is clearly the fight of our lives: to finally break the link between economic background and life chances, and in so doing, to lift our children out of the bleak, desperate world of crushing poverty, thereby giving them faith in the future.

The causes of 21st-century child poverty have been well documented. There has been much focus, and rightly so, on financial inputs and outputs that are, respectively, plummeting income and rising costs. However, amid the flurry of these high-impact interventions and initiatives that emerge from the child poverty strategy, there remains one of the most potent levers of all at our disposal to pull as vigorously as we can, and urgently so, and that is the role of inspired schools and inspiring teachers.

There is a simple formula for us to consider in this debate. Of all the levers at our disposal, education remains the single most effective way to genuinely attack that toxic link between background and success, and we know that, at the heart of that, are the heroes and heroines of the front line: our teachers. We know that it is teachers who are the most important in-school factor in improving outcomes for children, especially our poorest children.

In that regard, we would do well to reflect on a report published yesterday by Teach First, where I am proud to serve as a trustee. Entitled Class Dismissed, this new policy report shines a light on what has come to be termed “the persistently disadvantaged”—that is, deep poverty. That term is defined in simple ways. Persistently disadvantaged children are those who spend 80% of their school life eligible for free school meals. Often these proxy measures and technical definitions can seem remote, but, to be clear, that is more than 1 million children living in homes where often annual family income does not allow for the covering of the cost of basic essentials throughout the vast majority of a child’s life.

For these children, the lifecycle becomes painfully vicious. The report showed that, by the time they reach GCSE, the poorest children are nearly two years behind their non-disadvantaged peers in learning. Twenty-five per cent of the deeply poor, the persistently disadvantaged, will not be in post-16 education or training. From there, it is a steady decline, with meagre employment opportunities and lower earnings—and so it goes on. These bleak outcomes are not only the catastrophic consequences of child poverty but one of the clearest predictors of whether such poverty recurs in the next generation of children: the ultimate vicious cycle.

Yet we learned something else from the Teach First report that serves to inform this debate. These disastrous life outcomes for the persistently disadvantaged—the deeply poor—are not, and do not have to be, inevitable. We have seen pockets of real breakthrough, where strong school leaders and high-quality teaching can dramatically improve outcomes for our poorest children. These are schools which are not just feeding hungry children, as they do, not just buying them uniforms from their own school budgets, as they do, but vitally, and perhaps above all, creating for the deeply poor, the persistently disadvantaged, real beacons of hope, real aspiration, and a genuine sense—no cliché intended—that the opportunities which these children will pass to their own children will be immeasurably better than the life chances given to them. The cycle can be broken. Teachers, inspired and inspiring, can do that. They are doing it every day in classrooms up and down the country.

The Government have made one thing abundantly clear: they are absolutely determined to break the link between economic background and opportunity, and schools can be at the heart of that national mission. Yet we know from this report, too, and elsewhere, that schools serving the poorest communities find recruitment and retention of teachers exceptionally difficult. If we do not give that tangible attention, we will weaken one of the strongest levers at our disposal, which can lift children out of poverty permanently.

So, with that in mind, I hope my noble friend the Minister agrees that placing schools and teachers at the heart of our child poverty strategy gives us a fighting chance of breaking the cycle. It does not have to be an inevitable downward one.

This debate is clearly at times about financial allocation and definitely about policy choices. But, above all, it goes to the very heart of the society we wish to be and, in that sense, it is nothing short of a moral imperative.