ESRC Society Today

Embargoed until 11:45hrs on Friday 8th September

ASBO babies and the need for early intervention to prevent children from deprived backgrounds going off the rails are both stories to have created recent headlines. But why do some people do better than others, despite coming from a poorer background or having a deprived childhood? A new booklet, Capability and Resilience: Beating the Odds, published on Friday 8th September, aims to offer some answers.

The booklet, based on research by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Priority Network on Capability and Resilience, shows that at any stage of life, someone in an adverse situation can 'turn things round' under certain conditions. The most important condition is that they meet others who value them for themselves, recognise their strengths and talents, and encourage them to use these. 

Poorer children do better in schools where teachers recognise and encourage their abilities. This is an enormously important skill which is not sufficiently recognised.  Children from poorer families often do better if their parents not only show them warmth but also take an interest in their education. However, the research also demonstrates that someone in an economically disadvantaged situation can only overcome this to a certain extent. 

Professor Mel Bartley from the UCL Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, who co-ordinates the research network and who edited the booklet comments that, "Even the brightest children from poor families at the beginning of the school years tend to sink down intellectually, to the level of the rather less bright rich children, by the age of 16. It is these people whose talents are the most wasted by economic inequality."

The booklet also highlights research into work life balance within the UK asking whether having a highly paid, high status job is important enough to sacrifice the quality of family relationships. Professor Bartley comments that, "Our research suggests that men and women pursuing a career and delaying parenthood are not more satisfied with their lives at age 30 than men and women already living as a two parent family."

The reduction of material and emotional deprivation in childhood can encourage development of more secure relationships in childhood and adulthood.  These relationships are what enable people to overcome a wide range of adversities in ife, at all different ages.

The concept of increasing parental leave, and of giving parents the right to time off for family reasons, acknowledges the importance of time devoted to caring relationships. Although Government cannot make people take time off, it can put in place measures that will give people the opportunity to do so.

This new research, however, highlights that, even with policy innovations such as Sure Start, some of the most vulnerable families may still avoid contact with any kind of officially-provided service, for fear that they may be criticised for their life choices, or that their children may be removed from them. Once people contact Sure Start, their experiences are favourable suggesting that their experiences of other services have made some reluctant to participate. Tackling this could make Sure Start even more effective and this may be the reason why Sure Start is less effective than it might otherwise be.

Beating the Odds is also the subject of a panel session chaired by Professor Mel Bartley to be held during the BA Festival. It takes place on Friday 8 September 9.00 - 11.00am in room 01.08 in the Elizabeth Fry Building at UEA.  

For further information, contact:

• Patricia Crowley, Dept. of Epidemiology and Public Health, UCL on 020 7679 1708 or 07791973118 (mobile) or via e-mail: p.crowley@public-health.ucl.ac.uk
• Alexandra Saxon or Annika Howard at ESRC, on 01793 413032/413119  

Notes for editors

1. The booklet Capability and Resilience: Beating the Odds, is available free (electronic and hardcopy). Please see the C&R Network's website for order details.
2. The aim of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Priority Network on Capability and Resilience based is to contribute to policy by improving the scientific understanding of the socio-economic, biological and psychological circumstances that contribute to human capability and resilience over the life course.  Based at the UCL Department of Epidemiology and Public Health the network also has contributors from the University of Edinburgh, Queen Mary University, Imperial College London, University of London and the Karolinsk Institutet.  For more information visit: http://www.capabilityandresilience.org/
3. The ESRC is the UK's largest funding agency for research and postgraduate training relating to social and economic issues. It provides independent, high quality, relevant research to business, the public sector and Government. The ESRC total expenditure in 2005-06 was £135 million.  At any one time the ESRC supports over 4,000 researchers and postgraduate students in academic institutions and research policy institutes. More at http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk 
4. ESRC Society Today offers free access to a broad range of social science research and presents it in a way that makes it easy to navigate and saves users valuable time. As well as bringing together all ESRC-funded research (formerly accessible via the Regard website) and key online resources such as the Social Science Information Gateway and the UK Data Archive, non-ESRC resources are included, for example the Office for National Statistics. The portal provides access to early findings and research summaries, as well as full texts and original datasets through integrated search facilities. More at http://www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk
5. About University College London (UCL): Founded in 1826, UCL was the first English university established after Oxford and Cambridge, the first to admit students regardless of race, class, religion or gender, and the first to provide systematic teaching of law, architecture and medicine. In the government's most recent Research Assessment Exercise, 59 UCL departments achieved top ratings of 5* and 5, indicating research quality of international excellence.  
   UCL is the fourth-ranked UK university in the 2005 league table of the top 500 world universities produced by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. UCL alumni include Mahatma Gandhi (Laws 1889, Indian political and spiritual leader); Jonathan Dimbleby (Philosophy 1969, writer and television presenter); Junichiro Koizumi (Economics 1969, Prime Minister of Japan); Lord Woolf (Laws 1954 - Lord Chief Justice of England & Wales), Alexander Graham Bell (Phonetics 1860s - inventor of the telephone), and members of the band Coldplay.