Impact of Social Policy on Children

IMPACT OF SOCIAL POLICY ON CHILDREN
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Child Poverty Policy since 2010
Poverty is one of the curses that millions of people face everyday all over the world. every
person or family that lacks the enough resources to live a healthy and secured life can fall
under the below poverty zone. Children are the ones that suffer the most due to the poverty that
their families struggle with. As a result, they become victims of malnutrition, illness, and
diseases and also become one of the disadvantaged groups in the society who are debarred
from many opportunities from their early childhood periods. Thus, the social policies regarding
child poverty has become one of the important concerns in UK for the policy practitioners and
also for the poor families. So, in this study, two social policies have been evaluated on the
basis of their impact on children, their families and policy practitioners of UK in the recent
time. For that reason, some important aspects and background of the policies have been
investigated. The impact of these policies has been analyzed on the basis of the Eco System’s
theory given by Bronfenbrenner. Two chosen social policies for this evaluation are Free School
Meal Policy 2018 and Early Years Pupil Premium 2019.
The Free School Meal or FSM can be termed as a statutory benefit program in England that has
been launched in 2013 with the aim of giving free meals for all disadvantaged infant school
students from the year 2014. This benefit policy has been launched by the Education
Department of England for the children aging from 1 to 2 years (Department for Education,
2019). This policy has been revised in the year 2018 in order to identify the number of children
who are eligible for this statutory benefit. The scheme has been introduced by the government
so that no child can become victims of hunger due to poverty especially in their initial school
years. The difference between the new updated policies from its older version is that now more
children have been identified and have been taken under to eligibility criteria for this program.
On the other hand, more schools have been enrolled so that this policy can reach as much
infant pupils as possible (gov.uk, 2019). Thus, a new eligibility checking system has been
introduced for the school authorizes so that it becomes easier for them to follow the
identification process. On the other hand, this updated policy has phased out some benefits that
the families used to have under the FSM policy earlier. This has been done because of
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connecting the universal credit criteria with this policy. Previously the policy used to
collaborate with benefits like income related allowance for job seekers, income support, credit
for state pension, child tax credit and so on. Now, only universal credit has replaced all the
different benefits and thus it has been assumed that many children will be left out from getting
proper economical support. According to the Angela Rayner, secretary of Labour, many
children will lose opportunities after the collaboration of universal credit with this policy in
future (Blake, 2019). The reason behind is that the income threshold has been made frozen and
thus it has been predicted that over 1 million children, living under the poverty zone, will have
to suffer from this newly updated policy (Royston, 2019).
Early Years Pupil Premium is another social policy in UK for supporting children from 3 to 4
of age with some additional economical help. This has been introduced in 2015 with the aim of
reducing the gap between the children belonging from an economically balanced family and
the children living with low income families. This is also related to school education where the
little learners get all the facilities so that they can experience equal learning experiences as
their peers get to experience (The Foundation Years, 2019). For that reason, all the required
equipments are being provided to them through the school authorities with the aids given by
this policy. Recently the department of education has come up with a model that has been
helping them to identifying the eligible children for this policy. On the other hand, it has also
been ensured by this new model that the local school authorities get to know which learners of
their schools are to be provided with the benefits of this policy.
So, it can be said that early education period of low income family children have been ensured
through this particular social policy (Early Education, 2019). One of the issues that this policy
has been facing is that still there are a lot of educational institutions that did not apply for this
scheme due to lack of awareness about this policy. According to some reports, many school
authorities do not know that they have to apply for the fund to be released (Robberts, Griggs
and Robb, 2019). Some of the school authorities did not apply because they think that the
process is time consuming and too difficult for them to access (Burns, 2019). So, it can be said
that not much awareness campaigns have been organized from the part of the government to
promote this policy and thus many families have been suffering due to this lack of knowledge.
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