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| Nurturing potential |
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| Editorial Comment |
May 04 2004 |
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It is an assessment that should cause all of us to sit up and take notice. Scotland has an emerging underclass that is being fed by poor literacy and numeracy levels among young people that are stubbornly resistant to improvement. Social malfunction is apparent in rising rates of crime and the number of children born to unmarried parents. More middle-aged employees possess skills that are just not suited to the new economy. The findings, which will be delivered tonight by Professor James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning American economist, in the latest Allander lecture on Scotland's economy, should make grim reading for the Scottish Executive.
Addressing this underachievement, reducing crime, tackling poverty and delivering economic growth are priorities of Jack McConnell's administration. If Professor Heckman's analysis is right, the first minister will face a greater task than even he envisaged in turning around Scotland's economic performance and social malaise. However, Professor Heckman offers a panacea to confront his bleak assessment. He believes that the answer lies in investing in the skill base. It is not rocket science, but where he is radical is in suggesting that the investment should be targeted on pre-school children and their families.
Specifically, he has single-parent families and unmarried parents in mind because they are known to produce "impaired" children who perform poorly at school, at work and in society.
We might not approve of the blunt language, but it is beyond doubt that children from stable, two-parent homes have a much better start in life that tends to stand them in good stead in the longer term.
How to put children from "dysfunctional" families on an equal footing so that they are no longer disadvantaged or trapped in a cycle of poverty and underachievement? Professor Heckman cites the example of a study carried out over 35 years in Michigan, which selected a group of disadvantaged children for an intensive pre-school programme that also involved their parents, or single parent. They were tracked into adulthood. It was found that they earned more and were less likely to commit crime than peers who had not been on the programme. In addition, there has been a near nine-fold return on each dollar invested in the programme. The executive's policy of offering a nursery place to all three and four-year-olds aims to deliver similar, long-term benefits.
When targeted intervention can be vital to nurturing thinking and non-thinking skills at the crucial, pre-school stage, Professor Heckman wonders whether the "sanctity" of the family should be respected in the case of dysfunctional groups where children would otherwise be denied the opportunity to make early progress. Bringing families on board, so that they come to recognise the importance of feeding the minds of their children and developing their skills, is always better than compulsion, but if dysfunction is as big a problem as he suggests, is there much in the way of family sanctity to respect?
Addressing the problem of entrenched underachievement is perhaps the biggest problem facing Scotland. Professor Heckman's analysis is a challenging contribution to a debate in which we must engage.
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