Challenge Poverty Week: keeping curiosity at the heart of our response to poverty

Hanna McCulloch, Child Poverty and SAVVI Programme Manager, reflects on Challenge Poverty Week.

If I had a pound for every time I’ve encouraged local authorities to keep the three drivers of child poverty at the heart of their approach, while giving greater focus to the priority family groups, I could probably have ended child poverty in Scotland myself.

These two frameworks, the three drivers of poverty and the six priority family types, are invaluable. They help us organise a complicated picture and focus our attention where the risks of poverty are greatest. As we navigate public sector reform in the coming years, amid change and uncertainty, it will be more important than ever to keep them at the forefront of our thinking.

But my biggest takeaway from Challenge Poverty Week has been a reminder that frameworks should sharpen our approach, not blunt our curiosity.

Throughout Challenge Poverty Week, our series of breakfast briefings has focused on five of the six priority family types. What struck me was just how much complexity sits underneath those relatively simple labels.

Behind every category are different lives, barriers, systems and experiences. If we really want to prevent poverty, we have to keep asking what is happening underneath the label.

Monday: poverty, power and financial disempowerment

Monday’s discussion on lone-parent families, gender and violence against women was a powerful reminder that poverty cannot always be separated neatly from other experiences of inequality and harm.

The session highlighted how perpetrators can use gender inequality and financial insecurity to entrap and control women, including after separation, and how systems around employment, childcare and financial support can interact with those circumstances.

Ensuring women have enough money to leave a dangerous situation doesn’t solve the problem. But it is very difficult to begin solving anything when someone is experiencing ongoing financial crisis and disempowerment.

So while the drivers of poverty help us organise our thinking, our response cannot sit neatly within one service or policy area either. That means joining things up: trauma-informed practice, holistic support, human rights and our child poverty frameworks, recognising how closely financial security, autonomy and physical safety can be connected.

Tuesday: priority groups are a can-opener, not a conclusion

Tuesday made me think differently about the six priority family types themselves.

Focusing specifically on migrant families, rather than treating minority ethnic families as a single homogeneous group, opened up a much richer discussion. Migration status, length of time in Scotland, entitlement to public funds, language, knowledge of services, insecure incomes and additional costs can combine in very different ways.

For me, that is where the real value of priority groups lies. They are a can-opener, not a conclusion. They give us permission to open up a category and explore the multiplicity of stories and experiences contained within it.

The danger comes when the label becomes the analysis. Knowing that a family belongs to a priority group tells us something important about their risk of poverty. It does not necessarily tell us why that particular family is experiencing poverty, and therefore what needs to change.

Wednesday: what if we understand poverty as exclusion?

Wednesday took that thinking somewhere else again.

Peter Townsend’s understanding of poverty asks us to think beyond income alone and consider whether people have the resources they need to participate in the ordinary life of society.

Looked at through that lens, the discussion about disabled people was particularly striking.

We heard about barriers to employment, inadequate social security, the additional costs associated with disability, inaccessible transport and services, and social care charges. The discussion also connected social care with prevention, independence and people’s ability to work, volunteer, parent and participate in community life.

That raises an uncomfortable question: if people are being charged for the support they need to participate in society, are we contributing to the exclusion that constitutes de facto poverty?

If so, social care policy is child poverty policy too.

Thursday: prevention starts with our tiniest humans

Thursday took us right back to the beginning of life.

Babies’ brains develop rapidly from conception onwards, while their early environment plays an important role in shaping their development. At the same time, families with babies can face the double pressure of increased costs and reduced earnings associated with caring responsibilities.
That reinforced something quite simple for me: our tiniest humans need to be at the heart of a preventative approach to poverty.

Prevention means thinking about financial security, family support and children’s development together, from the very earliest stages of life. And the suggestion of deliberately directing a proportion of childern's services budgets towards families with babies seems like an important place to start.

Friday: see the strengths, question the system

Friday brought me back to where the week started: the difference between identifying who is at greater risk of poverty and understanding why.

The Strengths not Stigma research shows young mothers as ambitious, capable and determined, while also highlighting the structural barriers that can restrict their choices around work: childcare, low pay, inflexible jobs, discrimination, stigma and the interaction with social security.

What struck me was the challenge to turn our curiosity in the right direction. Rather than asking why a young mother cannot fit into a particular job, workplace or system, we should be asking what it is about that system that is creating the barrier.

Curiosity shouldn’t just be directed at people and their circumstances. Sometimes we need to turn it back on our own systems and ask why they work the way they do.

And that, I think, is my main reflection from the week.

The three drivers help us understand what causes child poverty. The six priority family types help us see where the risks are concentrated. But neither should become a checklist.

They should make us curious. About what is happening in people’s lives. About how different experiences intersect. About the barriers our systems create. And about what we might do differently if prevention really was our starting point.

Because the more deeply we understand what sits underneath poverty, the better chance we have of moving beyond mitigating its consequences and towards preventing it in the first place.

Frameworks help us see the pattern. Curiosity, and our own humanity, help us understand the person. We need both.

Here's a list of the organisations who presented and a link to some of their research.