Making use of Growing Up in Scotland data available from the UK Data Service, Morag Treanor and Patricio Troncoso have sought to highlight the importance of social factors in mitigating disparities in the lives of young people in areas such as poverty, health, housing and discrimination.
In this post we introduce the latest Impact Case study which looks at this topic.
Children’s lives and outcomes
Research conducted over several years by Treanor and Troncoso has helped to highlight the multi-faceted nature of children and young people’s mental health. In recent years this has been part of a strand of work at the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research (SCADR), which Treanor has lead on.
What have they found?
The research shows that family composition (e.g. lone parenthood), is less important than the poverty and social isolation lone parenthood can bring.
Wider financial vulnerability and material and area-based deprivation have adverse impacts on children and mothers’ emotional and mental health. This is over and above the negative effects of income poverty.
They also found that persistent poverty has the strongest effect across all outcomes.
Impact
This work builds on a significant body of related research, led by Treanor, focussing on child poverty, family and child wellbeing and mental health. Examples of the impact that that research has had are:
Influencing Scottish government legislation
Treanor’s research was instrumental to the strengthening of the Child Poverty Act (Scotland) 2017 by ensuring the inclusion of priority groups and areas such as lone parents, education and income maximisation. Income maximisation comprises benefits advice delivered through statutory services, e.g. health, to ensure everyone is claiming their full entitlement.
Treanor’s research further influenced the inclusion of interim child poverty targets to measure and monitor progress in the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act. Bruce Adamson, former Children & Young People’s Commissioner Scotland, says:
“Her evidence and work with key MSPs during the passage of the Child Poverty (Scotland) Bill helped to ensure significant amendments at Stage 2, not least around interim targets and income maximisation. This ultimately led to a more ambitious Act.“
Treanor’s longitudinal qualitative research with families influenced the Scottish Government decision to introduce an income supplement of £10 per week per child for low-income families, announced in the ‘Tackling child poverty delivery plan 2018-2022’, from December 2020. This is expected to reach over 400,000 children in Scotland, lifting 30,000 children out of relative poverty. John Dickie, Director of CPAG Scotland writes:
“The experience of parents living in poverty reflected in your research has directly informed CPAG’s involvement in the Give Me Five campaign to top-up child benefit in Scotland by £5 a week. Although the Scottish Government has not committed to such a top-up they have committed to introduce an income supplement for low income families by 2022.” John Dickie, CPAG.
Implementation of training for practitioners and delivery of professional services
Treanor’s engagement with practitioners and professionals has led to changes in professional practice. It supported the development of a ‘Child poverty, health and wellbeing’ eLearning module for use in the initial education of healthcare workers. Treanor’s involvement encouraged NHS Health Scotland to include education professionals into their work on child poverty.
More recently, Treanor and Troncoso have disseminated their findings at academic conferences and the wider public. They have engaged with NESTA, an independent charity that works to increase the innovation capacity of the UK, in stakeholder meetings. They have also met with The Counselling Services (TCS) group, who provide mental health services for school-age children and young people in various councils in Scotland. TCS representatives have noted that our papers using the “contextualised whole-family approach” framework has sparked their interest in developing new practices that can help address wider issues surrounding mental health in the family and not just the children and young people that are referred to them.
The impact of the most recent papers will hopefully be ongoing. In the meantime, they continue working closely with the Scottish Government in their research using administrative data from Education, Health and the Census to understand longitudinal associations between educational trajectories and outcomes, individual and structural factors, mental health and familial socioeconomic circumstances.
Mental health, wellbeing and children in data
The mental health and wellbeing of children and young people has become a pressing issue over the past couple of decades, and increasingly in the past few years. Data available in the UK Data Service catalogue has been used extensively in research in this area. You can find out more about some of this work and the role data is playing on our impact theme pages Mental health and wellbeing in data and Children and young people in data.