Tory MP defends remark over parenting in town (msn.com)
As the son of Bury parents, James Daly, the MP for Bury North, could have been talking about me when he foolishly said that the children who struggle in the town are just the offspring of “crap parents”. Or perhaps the fact that I have done well enough in life to take his stupid remarks apart means that I am not struggling and that my parents are retrospectively exempt from his strictures. I suppose it depends on how we define success, a subtlety that is obviously lost on Mr Daly, which is just one of the many things wrong with his silly statement. If you know nothing about public policy, have never visited a theatre, are unacquainted with human psychology and have never read a novel it might just about be possible to think that the sins of the father fall straight into the life of the son, but not otherwise.
The problem with Mr Daly’s formula is its reductive simplicity. It is a stupid statement wherever it is applied but let’s be more specific here. In the matter of identifying specifically the parents of Bury to be singled out for being crap, Mr Daly has picked the wrong adversary. A few years ago, I led a commission, at the request of the leader of Bury council, into the fortunes of young people in the town. Over six months we covered every aspect of the life chances of people in Bury and considered every putative cause of success and failure. If the whole thing could be explained by crap parents, the endeavour would have been a lot easier and a lot quicker than it was.
We discovered that Bury is a town of social extremes which are disguised as average performance. On many of the usual measures – educational attainment, adult morbidity, criminal offences – Bury was in the middle of the pack for the North West, neither notably good nor notorious. This led to a certain amount of complacency – especially in the education sector – that things were fine and that no emphatic action was really required. But when we dug into the numbers we found a lot to support what we were told time and again – that many children in Bury were, indeed, struggling.
Bury is an old mill town which is simultaneously a conurbation, a town (six towns in fact) and a rural place. It has borders with the cities of both Manchester and Salford and seems, in effect, to run into both. Yet it is also a town in its own right, distinct and proudly not Manchester, and five other centres which claim township status.. Then, north of the town but still within the borough, the West Pennine Moors begin and the beautiful villages in the hills make Bury rural too.
Up in the hills, a new population has emerged. Bury’s proximity to Manchester, its relatively inexpensive housing very close to the M66 makes the town a viable destination for young professionals working in the city centre. The academic performance of the town is made up of excellent results from the sons and daughters of wealthy parents in the north of the town and less good results from the children of poorer parents in the east. We found this was true on almost all measures of progress. There was a lot of fantastic success and just as much really worrying failure. Bury was average in the sense that the man who has his head in the oven and his feet in the fridge feels fine, on average.
Note that I said the sons and daughters of wealthy and poor parents, not the sons and daughters of crap parents. There are, of course there are, terrible parents. There are some who are outright malign and plenty more who do not mean to mess you up, but who do. There are wealthy parents who are terrible and there is certainly no reason why being poor ensures that anyone will be a bad parent. But the links between household income and struggling in life are really very obvious and it takes a determined fool to ignore them and say simply that it can all be put down to crap parents.
The connection between household income and life chances in Bury, like everywhere, was close. Many people defy it and rise out of unpromising circumstances, but many do not. So, if Mr Daly is at all interested in a better question than the one he asked, he might wonder what makes people crap parents. It is rarely the case that they are simply crap people. Don’t think I am sentimental about this; I’m not. I went to school with some children in Bury whose parents I would wish on nobody. Some of those very children have grown up to be parents I would not want near a child. But even this is to suppose that there is nothing we can do and that is wrong.
Apart from addressing household income, there is something that public policy can do to help. Why should we assume that being a good parent is a skill we are just born with? Why should we assume that it is impossible to get better at it, to learn? It’s wrong to assume, as Mr Daly does, that people are just crap and that is that. There is a report from 2017 from the Social Mobility Commission, which summarized what is known about the impact of parenting classes. It showed that they can help to give parents a greater understanding of child development and develop parents’ confidence in their role. Even if you are crap today, you don’t have to be crap tomorrow. Yet, as I write, Tory MPs are falling over themselves to denounce Labour’s plans for the expansion of nursery care which would, I am sure about it, be a significant help to the parents of Bury.
There is one more aspect to this tawdry affair which shows how badly the Conservative party has lost its discipline. James Daly has a majority in Bury North of 105. He is sitting on the most marginal seat in the country. Perhaps he has just given up and decided to say what he really thinks before returning to practice in the criminal law. But if he has any hope at all of clinging on, then you might have thought that insulting his constituents was a rather strange way of going about it. The children of Bury have no votes but the parents he has denounced as crap all do. Let them do their worst.
Phil I agree with this but how do you get the parents who need support to go to parenting classes? Most think it comes naturally and the ones who might most need it are likely to be the refuseniks. Do you wait until their kids are truanting and try compulsion? Is there an incentive that works?
When I worked with schools in poor areas the heads invariably said that the parents were the problem because their own experience of education was negative so they saw it as a waste of time. They worked on changing the parents’ minds. (It was incidentally the difference between white working class young parents who’d been to london schools and ended up in low paid manual jobs and highly aspirational immigrant parents who saw education as the golden ticket to life chances and were highly disciplined with their kids.) The parents were n’t crap but their aspirations were extremely low and that’s what they passed on.
Agree but it’s v hard to do and many won’t accept as they see it as punishment no matter how packaged. And quality of provision needs to be such that it both is and feels of value. Minimising cost of delivery risks compromising quality.