Child Poverty: A Call to Action

“Living in poverty significantly impacts on family resilience and family stability. With a negative effect on the emotional and physical wellbeing of parents and carers, persistent poverty has serious effects on the life chances of children from birth, inhibiting physical, social and emotional development and meaning poorer children are up to nine months behind their peers.  In turn, limited educational attainment acts as the key driver of poverty resulting in worklessness or low income employment, restricting opportunities in adulthood and frequently leading to inter-generational cycles of poverty.

Research recently undertaken by the Children’s Society Policy Unit additionally highlights the impact upon children’s experiences at school being usually adversely affected due to bullying, inability to participate in extracurricular activities and trips, and attainment.

There are 47,000 children & young people in Essex identified as living in poverty. This does not necessarily mean they are members of families who are entirely dependent upon benefits  but of those whose income is persistently low, and whose parents face terrible dilemmas around how their  sparse  resources should be spent. 

Mid Essex Children’s Partnership holds the view that talking about these horrible facts and figures is just not enough …. We need to call you across the partnership to action!

What we want to do: Give consideration to the Child Poverty Strategy which has been recently put together by Essex County Council, the issue raised, its intended outcomes and how we can then action the recommendations locally.

What we intend to do: Pull together a partnership approach to improving the quality of the lives of these known children/ young people by calling you all to action with the aim of ensuring families have access to advice and support in a way which is helpful and non- judgemental with the aim of ameliorating some of the consequences of poverty.

Our starting point is to invite you to come together and hear key messages from some of the Local and National strategists in this area, meet our local providers and project leads but more importantly work together to identify how we can develop a partnership charter which brings our agencies together to devise plans to support families before the point where they feel overwhelmed.

Mid Essex Children’s Partnership Board therefore invite you to:

Hylands House, London Road, Chelmsford CM2 8WQ

On Monday 22nd June 1-4.30pm

The programme will include speakers with subject matter expertise, small workshop activity and opportunities to network with a broad range of projects delivering support in Mid Essex.

Refreshments will be available.

Please book your place by contacting Cherrill.wheatley@essex.gov.uk

To book a provider stall to promote your service which offers advice and/ or support specifically around managing debt, poor emotional and physical health and other consequences of poverty, please contact  Jill.holland@essex.gov.uk

Please come, our families need this!”

Mid Essex Children’s Partnership Board

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