Child Poverty: Ethnicity

Lord Farmer Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, it is obviously concerning that certain ethnic minority groups still have a greater percentage of children in low-income households than the national average and illuminating that children from Pakistani and Bangladeshi households perform higher than the national average at GCSE level despite this. As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley has just indicated, there is a disparity here. Also, white Irish and white British pupils have the largest gaps between average educational outcomes for students eligible for free schools meals and those who are not, while Chinese, black African, Bangladeshi and Pakistani students have the smallest gaps. In other words, income is only one determinant that should be of interest to policymakers.

This further substantiates evidence from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities that certain ethnic groups, such as black African, Indian and Bangladeshi pupils, perform better than white British groups once socioeconomic status is taken into consideration. The commission partly attributes such achievements to “immigrant optimism” and greater devotion than the native population to education as a way out of poverty. It recommends that the Government invests in research to understand what factors drive the success of high-performing pupil communities, including black African, Chinese, Bangladeshi and Indian ethnic groups, and how this can be replicated to support all pupils.

The CRED report has proven controversial for many reasons, but it contains important messages that we ignore to the detriment of those whom policy should support. Its findings and those of the ONS highlight that poor white British populations should also be seen as ethnicities deserving of policy attention. Poor white people in the north-east of England are the largest group with multidimensional disadvantages, such as income and life expectancy. Importantly, the north-east also has the largest proportion of lone-parent families in England after London. The CRED report made the neglected point that family breakdown is

“one of the main reasons for poor outcomes”,

and that

“Family is also the foundation stone of success for many ethnic minorities.”


Those ethnicities that are doing better educationally also have lower numbers of families where there is only one parent; for example, 40% of black African families and 6% of Indian families, compared with 60% of black Caribbean families. Strengthening families must be central to effective policy to tackle social inequality. As co-founder of the Family Hubs Network, I welcome the Government’s adoption of family hubs as official policy and their continued funding of the reducing parental conflict and supporting families programmes. Will the Minister say what the Government are doing to ensure that family hubs and these other strands of policy are outworked in a way that fully includes families from all ethnicities?