Why disadvantaged children succeed. public welfare

To build more inclusive societies, every country needs to step up its education efforts to help the poorer fulfil their promise of self-realisation and have access to opportunities in life. We need to make disadvantaged children our priority! According to a new set of 12 indicators on equity in education, only a few OECD countries offer people from poor backgrounds the same opportunity to succeed as their better-off peers, notably Estonia, Japan, Korea and the Netherlands.

On the other hand, in Chile, France, Israel, Poland, the Slovak Republic, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States, there are exceptionally large gaps between the more advantaged in society and the disadvantaged. And in Finland and Korea, which have relatively low equity gaps in performance compared to other OECD countries, the gap has widened.

In many countries, access to quality early childhood education, to schools with highly qualified teachers and to adult education and training is still the preserve of the highly skilled, well-educated adults and employees of large firms. Children with better-educated parents are six times less likely to drop out at lower secondary level or before, compared to students whose parents have a lower educational background. To create an equitable lifelong learning system, equity must be made an explicit priority, says the report, with progress rewarded systematically through monitoring and evaluations.

This book analyzes how welfare reform can improve the lives of children, based on a study of successful programs that provide services to needy children and their families. The study looked at programs that operated in conjunction with the welfare department before the enactment of the Family Support Act and that operated successfully. Chapter 1 is an introduction. Chapter 2 examines the methodological question of how to define successful programs. Chapter 3 discusses barriers that welfare agencies face in reforming services to meet children's and families' needs.

Chapter 4 describes services offered by successful programs, which range from nurse home visits and early childhood education to advocacy on behalf of welfare families with other community agencies. Chapter 5 analyzes strategies that enable programs to succeed and overcome barriers, arguing that these programs address a common set of tasks but develop different approaches to them in order to respond to each agency's unique circumstances.