24 September 2008
Social Mobility as the Engine of Inclusion
Professor Alan Hayes, Director, Australian Institute of Family Studies
Abstract, slides and audio of presentation
Edited transcript
The following audio presentation is brought to you by the Australian Institute of Family Studies as part of our monthly seminar series in which we showcase national and international research related to the family.
The seminars are designed to promote a forum for discussion and debate. They are open to the public and free of charge.
Seminar facilitated & speaker introduced by Dr Matthew Gray.
Professor Alan Hayes:
I'd like to start first by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. It's hard to talk about social exclusions and social inclusion without thinking about the extent to which Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been excluded. So I think there's a sense in which if we want to close the intergenerational gap in life expectancy and health and educational attainment and access to employment and just access to a dignified and quality life, thinking about social inclusion for that group and other disadvantaged groups is extremely important.
I want to acknowledge my colleagues, Dr Matthew Gray and Dr Ben Edwards - this is very much a joint effort. Matthew, Ben and I wrote a paper earlier in the year around the issue of social inclusion and a lot of the content on this is from that paper. Diana Smart's work for The Smith Family has also informed this presentation. Diana focused on the transition to school using analyses of data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) to explore how disadvantaged children stand in terms of being ready to move into school.
Nancy Virgona has done a great job in time fine tuning the PowerPoint presentation and doing a million other things for me, so thank you Nancy. I'm delighted you could be here today.
But it's a great privilege to work with the Australian Institute of Family Studies. This is a wonderful place with a dynamic set of researchers whose work informs the formulation of policy, both at the Commonwealth level, but also for the States and Territories. I am so delighted and glad that we've got some people here from the local government too because I think increasingly a lot of the action around social inclusion involves that tier of government.
I first want to talk briefly about the backgrounds of the development of social inclusion. The term social exclusion comes from the French for "les exclus", those who were excluded from the welfare and social insurance systems in France and it highlighted the growth in that country of groups of people who typically are living in closed communities that are extremely problematic in terms of their access to the wider society and also the extent to which they have difficulty achieving inclusion.
Of course social inclusion and exclusion highlight the issue of poverty and it moves you forward from just a debate about poverty to a debate about the many other features that can exclude a person. It is interesting that if one goes back, everything old is new again in one sense and if I think about the work that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s about the situation he found in England when he wrote the Memoir on Pauperism, it is very interesting to think that what he saw there was a country that had a very serious problem in the 1830s with poverty and that problem, of course, led to exclusion of people in very dramatic ways that he hadn't observed in other European countries.
One hundred and seventy-odd years later, it's interesting to reflect on the fact that in the UK the hundred postcodes that are most disadvantaged are the same neighbourhoods and locations that 100 years ago were identified as the most disadvantaged. So entrenching exclusion is another dimension of what I'd like to talk about today.
Exclusion involves limited opportunities for participation, to be integrated into the life of the society, to be connected through social capital, to access opportunities available to the rest of the community and to exercise power and agency over one's life, so to be disempowered and to lack agency.
The themes: relativity's an interesting aspect because, of course, exclusion is relative to the norms of society at a particular point in time. Michael Marmot talks about the issue of the gradients in health and wellbeing and makes the observation that African-Americans, for example, have four times the income of a person, a man living in Costa Rica. But they have a nine year shorter life expectancy. So that it's relative to the rest of your society that I think is the issue and that's why the focus squarely needs to be on equality and mobility.
Agency, of course, is another dimension that I've already mentioned, but when one thinks about it, people can choose to exclude themselves in some aspects of life of the community. In the US, for example, where voting is not compulsory, about half the population typically excludes themselves from their democratic rights. But of course there are others who are excluded by the structures, organisations and decisions of major institutions in society.
There's an aspect of prospectivity. It's not just how you are now, but it's how you will be in the future and whether your prospects are limited in the future. I think that's an extremely important dimension because it touches on not only how you are now, but also whether the prospects of your children will be limited in the future.
The definitions are many and various. I've only chosen a small number but it's really the notion of the linked problems that people have. It's not just a matter of poverty. Poverty may not necessarily exclude you, but it may be excluding in combination with unemployment, with low skill, with low income, with poor housing, with high crime environments, bad health and family breakdown.
Exclusion can vary across a lifetime and I'll say a little more about that later. It's the key aspect of exclusion from opportunities to participate in the life of the wider society that the second definition indicates.
Social exclusion, to unpack Levitas' definition, is a complex and multidimensional process. It's the lack or denial of resources, rights, goods and services and the inability to participate and it affects both the quality of life of the individual but also affects the cohesion and quality of the society. Societies that widen the gap, as you'll see later, are societies that really are carrying a large cost in terms of the quality of life, not only for the excluded, but also for the rest of the society.
Exclusion doesn't feature much in the US discourse. In the US, as Ben Edwards pointed out to me, social disorganisation is more likely to be the term that's used and people talk about the under-class and they talk about communities where it's difficult for people to be mobile and it's difficult to capitalise on the sorts of interventions and investments available because of the extent of disorganisation of the community.
Minister Miliband in the United Kingdom has said there are three forms of exclusion: wide exclusion and that's to a large number being excluded on a single or small number of indicators and the policy solutions there are, for example, income support or availability of high quality, universally accessible education or, for example, wide availability of health supports.
Deep exclusion may be where people are excluded on the multiple and overlapping sorts of dimensions that I spoke about before and it's more entrenched and deep-seated than wide exclusion. So this would be, for example in the most extreme of cases, people who are rough sleeping and who essentially are excluded on multiple dimensions. Or it could be children who are in such disadvantaged, abusive or neglectful households that they are excluded from a whole range of things due to the chaos of the life circumstances in which they find themselves.
There's also concentrated exclusion. I mentioned it before in terms of the 100 postcodes in the United Kingdom that 100 years ago were the same locations that have the same social problems that we have now, concentrated in areas. Or if one things of what's happened to the post-industrial society in cities like Bradford or you think about the areas around the cities in France and the extent to which you have concentration of serious social exclusion. There are, of course, locational or intervention approaches, place-based interventions make are a key element in addressing the problem.
It's also interesting to think about the fact that in Australia Tony Vinson's reports on postcode disadvantage show that some of the same postcodes are repeated featured in his analyses of areas of high concentration of disadvantage.
So the aim from a policy and practice point of view is in terms of those who are most socially included. One wants to ensure there are the safety nets and the policies to prevent people sliding into deep exclusion because all of us, given the right combination of life circumstances can do that. Of course in terms of those who are deeply excluded, the aim is to decrease the level of exclusion and this is where the mobility story becomes most powerful. It's the ability to be able to move people from exclusion to inclusion.
This has been the story of this nation. If one thinks of the "Fatal Shore", Australia is a nation built upon people who came from a background as convicts, came from very dislocated lives in places like Ireland and England, and within a generation, of course, the children of those convicts were in fact least likely to infringe against the law. Maybe that shows the fear factor, but they were also the most likely to be mobile and to have moved into a wide range of opportunities in life that gave their own children a better start. So this has been a nation, in a sense, that's been built on mobility and mobility is what we need to protect.
There's a relational dimension of social exclusion that's less frequently talked about in the literature. Of course I've mentioned non-participation in common activities, but it also is a matter of the quality of social networks and relationships. That term, social disorganisation, often points to the fact that people are isolated, and don't have connections to their communities.
Tony Vinson's work in the western suburbs of Sydney is very interesting because if one goes to the same street and looks at the mapping where child abuse and neglect are occurring and then you look at the household characteristics and you particularly look at the extent of the social network, you can predict the hotspots for child abuse in terms of small size of social network. When human beings are isolated, when they're not supported, when they're not connected, then risk factors go up. One of the extremes of the indicators of that is, of course, abuse of children. Where you have widest networks and supports, rates of abuse according to Vinson are likely to be less, to be lower.
Of course support available in times of crisis and the extent to which people can draw on neighbours' help, they can draw on family help and it's support in time of crisis which often is the thing that prevents them tipping over into entrenched exclusion.
Disengagement from political and civil activity is another dimension that I think is particularly relevant. It's another index of the loss or lack of agency and power. I notice in terms of people who get older, oftentimes, and Ruth [Weston] pointed this out to me, older people are living at home and they're at home for longer, but their world may be shrinking, their social connections may be less.
I noticed that with my mother who was a very outgoing person, I didn't inherit any of that, but basically an outgoing person who, after she'd broken her leg at the age of 93, essentially couldn't walk to the shops. When she couldn't walk to the shops she didn't have contact with people who'd known her for most of her lifetime because she'd lived for 70 years in the one street. When that happened, her world shrank and as her world shrank then lots of other changes occurred to her. She became less alert, she became more introverted, and she became more focused on the sense of a world that was slipping away from her in terms of the confining effect of it old age and the frailties it brings.
You also find that with people whose relationships break down. All of a sudden, a social network that was the couple's network becomes divided and fractured and relationships with in-laws and grandparents of children start to become less frequent and yet the sense of social exclusion and isolation.
Our interest in it is more recent than in the UK or Europe and essentially the McClure Report didn't actually talk about social inclusion, but it did talk about some of the things at the heart of it. Reduction of jobless families and households, reduction in those who are heavily reliant on income support and stronger communities with opportunities for people to participate were key themes in terms of how welfare might be reformed.
The landmark example in the States and Territories is South Australia where the Premier, of course, is the Minister for Social Inclusion and formed the Social Inclusion Commission with Commissioner David Cappo, Monsignor David Cappo, and they've had a range of references. They built their approach on really accurate information.
For example, if one thinks about rough sleepers, within the CBD of Adelaide, the popular press had a campaign about the epidemic of crime among rough sleeping people in the CBD and how the streets were no longer safe, law and order was suffering. There were, correct me if I'm wrong Matthew, I think there were 12 rough sleepers in the CBD in total; hardly an epidemic.
One person out of the 12 accounted for 80 per cent of the crime and was well known to police and of course the solution could be put into an appropriate perspective to the scope of the problem. But at times, I think, exclusion is exacerbated by the way in which we don't accurately reflect the nature of the problem. So there's a data gap in terms of who is excluded and how they're excluded.
Exclusion also occurs because of our stereotyping. As I said at the outset, not all people who are poor are living in dysfunctional households or living in households that are excluded. Many of them are active in their communities and we need to move beyond simplistic single dimensions.
The focus in Australia, as the Deputy Prime Minister sketched earlier this year, is around those elements I've already talked about: securing a job, accessing services, connecting with others through family, friends, work, personal interests in the community, dealing with crises, being able to not be tipped over the edge by ill health or bereavement or the loss of a job and being heard, having your voice heard. There's also been a tendency with concentrated exclusion to silence people.
The prior aspects are there, the priorities are clear. Building on Tony Vinson's work on place-based disadvantage, jobless families, homelessness, child poverty, intergenerational disadvantage are the focus of this talk, as are employment of people with a disability and of course children at risk. I'm going to touch briefly on some of these, so let's start with children at risk.
It's modernity's paradox that we live in an era where the wealth of the world and the wealth of the developed nations is unimaginably great, greater than at any other time in history. We talk about a financial and economic meltdown and crisis at the moment, but comparatively speaking, our nations are wealthy. But there are increasing challenges to the development of health and wellbeing of children, or that's the perception.
The report that the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare released today does show the groups that are in strife. Improvements are being made in Indigenous health and education, but the mortality rates are much higher than you find in the general population.
Diana Smart's work from the Australian Temperament Project has also been prominently covered today in the media. You see there most young people are doing very well, but there's a percentage of young people who are doing poorly and whose problems at the moment can be the sorts of things that will make inclusion difficult.
We know that Australia does reflect the paradox, but it reflects it in terms of groups within the community where children are not doing well at all. The pathways to poor outcomes are well understood now and they've been well established and social gradients, to use that term that I referred to from Michael Marmot have been observed in several areas of development, health and wellbeing.
When one looks at locational disadvantage, Bob Gregory and Boyd Hunter's work is interesting because it highlights the level of income inequality and how it's increasing over time in this country and that we are mirroring what's happened in the UK, in the United States and Canada. Dr Ben Edwards has done some very interesting work using the longitudinal study of Australian children and examining the sorts of social, emotional and learning outcomes of children as a function of their social address.
So let's look: Boyd Hunter's work shows that if equality were the case, you would expect that this was a flat curve. It wouldn't matter where you lived, you would be at the median of neighbourhood quality. But what we have of course is quite a steep gradient and our pattern reflects the sorts of patterns that you have in the two top graphs, the US and Canada, not quite as extremely, but moving in that direction.
Dr Edwards' work shows the effects of neighbourhoods on an index of development called the continuous outcome index which was a composite measure of how child development's proceeding. Look at the figure in terms of the children who were in the lowest - whose families are in the bottom quintile, the most disadvantaged quintile and look at the gradient. So by four or five years of age, you're starting to see these effects as a function of inequality, as reflected in the broad socioeconomic characteristics of neighbourhoods. This is a fascinating slide because it shows for the girls, they're the blue - and I think that's good, the girls are blue - for the girls there's not that much difference. There's not that much of a gradient in terms of social emotional outcomes across neighbourhood. But look at the impacts on boys, a very interesting trend. Boys are ding much worse than girls, in similar neighbourhoods.
So neighbourhoods are particularly influencing the development of boys and they're doing it very early in life. We know the effect disadvantaged neighbourhoods basically have - children from those neighbourhoods have poorer learning and behavioural outcomes and physical health outcomes, there are higher rates of a whole range of health and mental health problems, so higher rates of infectious diseases, asthma, smoking.
For young people today, the smoking rate is about half of what it was a decade ago, but if you go to disadvantaged neighbourhoods you have higher rates. Depression, nutritional problems, lower self rated health, all relate to social address or neighbourhood location and of course reduced job and educational prospects.
Australia of course has a poverty rate that's on the average for the OECD. But we do have the dubious honour of having the second-highest rate of jobless families with children in the OECD - we're number two. If one looks at poverty, there we are, almost on the OECD average. Interesting to reflect on the UK, Turkey, US and Mexico at this end and to reflect on Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, Switzerland, Czech Republic, France, Luxemburg, The Netherlands, Germany, but here we are, we're in the middle of the pack.
But then if one reflects on homelessness, 100,000 Australians are homeless, including 10,000 children under the age of 12 who are in extremely prejudicial circumstances when one things of development, health and wellbeing. Of course homelessness is strongly related to domestic violence and mental illness. So those children are growing up with a package of things that place them at risk, not just neighbourhood home circumstances but what has led to the problem.
If you look at international comparisons, which I've started to do, how do we rate? The really interesting question that Professor Jonathan Bradshaw recently posed when he was here in Australia, is why do the UK and the US rate so poorly? Do we really want to head in the direction of those two countries and what might explain the differences? If I look at it, this is child wellbeing and poverty. There's an overall composite measure of child wellbeing that takes health and other mental health and developmental characteristics and then there's the child poverty rate.
Australia, reflecting the data I've already shown you, is in the middle of the pack. Look where the UK and the US are: very low overall child wellbeing and very high rates of child poverty. It's not a positioning I'd like to see. New Zealand, as the New Zealand Children's Commissioner pointed out about month or so ago, is in a similar position in terms of concerning trends on child poverty and low wellbeing. So we're in a position that's quite good in one sense, but I think quite brittle and fragile in another sense.
If we now look at social expenditure and child wellbeing, here's child wellbeing, quite high for Australia and we're about in the third in terms of social expenditure. Look, though, at the US: low social expenditure, low child wellbeing. The UK is interesting because it spends quite a bit on social expenditure, but has low child wellbeing and you can see why there has been a focus on social exclusion.
But this graph goes some of the way to explaining the difference. I thank Matthew for drawing this to my attention, to explaining the difference. Look at the United States and the United Kingdom in terms of the mobility of earnings across generations. The higher the bar, the more likely your earnings will be the same as your mother or father's earnings. So this suggests a high correlation between what they earned and what you do. Look at where we are: we're down in the very good end of the pack which means you can't really predict strongly, knowing your parent's social address, where you will be and this is the heart of the mobility issue for us.
The society that's open and gives opportunities I think is going to place that society in a much better position and I think the case is becoming rather clear that, in contrast, there are societies that have entrenched disadvantaged and difference. They're divided nations.
Diana Smart has been working with the Smith Family on a project looking at the link between disadvantaged and transition to school, how ready for school children area. Here's the overall outcome index from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, for the infants. The gradient's pretty flat. In fact if anything, the higher social class group has lower outcomes in infancy. Look at what's happened by two years to three years of age, the gradient's started to become steeper and look what's happened by six to seven years of age. So disadvantage fuels developmental difference and it does it quite dramatically and it does it quite quickly.
Diana and her colleagues looked at school readiness and you take a number of measures of disadvantaged versus not disadvantaged. If the bars in this figure overlap, then it's not a significant difference. If they're separated they're significant. So in school readiness measures on the Who Am I test which is a measure of readiness to make the transition to school, you can see the difference for each of the financial hardship measures, the same difference, whether the disadvantage is measured in terms of low income, Government support or income as the main source of income or perceptions of the family as being poor or very poor, the relationships are similar.
If one looks at a measure of language comprehension - psychologists love these acronyms - the PPVT which is the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test which is a test of language comprehension that correlates with a lot of other developmental and learning related characteristics. With regard to income, look at the gulf here - a fantastic difference in language comprehension from this longitudinal study so far, same thing with financial hardship.
So children are going to school less well prepared to enter a world where language comprehension's vital for learning, you can't pick up the knowledge about how you regulate yourself, where you put your lunchbox and where your bag goes and what you have to do with your desk, all that stuff. If you've started behind the eight ball, then potentially this is something that's going to fuel your difficulty in a number of domains.
Same thing with behaviour, very interesting trends and here the differences are consistently that those who are not financially disadvantaged have lower scores on these areas of potential difficulty. So you can see how children who come to school with this mix have a fairly toxic combination of characteristics when it comes to moving into the life of the school and succeeding. With literacy, again, we are seeing the same trend.
Numeracy shows basically the same trend.
Recent interest in early childhood development, though, I think gives us part of the story about how we need a lifespan approach to this problem of social inclusion. There's much talk about the brain research, the new brain research. I don't want to sound cynical, but the new brain research is a lot of the work that I dealt with as an undergraduate in psychology. But it's interesting because it speaks to me most powerfully about children in severe abuse and neglect situations and much of the research, of course is based on children in those circumstances.
The bulk of the research, though, is based on experiments with animals in deprived circumstances and a lot of the studies that are close to us are with non-human primates. Of course non-human primates, what you see there is the vital importance of the first three years of life. I think the first three years of life are vitally important, but I wouldn't generalise too far from non-human primate studies because typically they reach puberty at three, which is quite a difference from the life span developmental pattern for us. But abuse and neglect do compromise neurological development. They lead to greater reactivity in children; they lead to a range of problems that emerge in life.
The efficacy of early interventions is clear and such interventions have been shown to be cost effective on the basis for what's now called the economics of human capital investment, most clearly associated with James Heckman. The cost benefit analyses show that for investments in early intervention with children from disadvantaged and deprived backgrounds, you essentially do get a large return on the money. But they're all typically very small scale and the index example, the Perry Preschool Program, essentially had 58 three to four-year-old children in the intervention group. Of course they speak well to what happens in severely disadvantaged communities, but I have an open mind as to how far they go across the whole of the population.
The recent interest in early childhood development is a foundation for social inclusion and we need to differentiate its policy and practice implications. It's important to have quality, universally available systems of early childhood experience that promote positive developmental outcomes. Whether that's in the home or whether it's in the centre or whether it's family day care, is another matter, but vitally important, it should be linked to systems to monitor children's development so you can pick up early on children who are having difficulty.
Most parents know by the age of about three or four whether their child is having a problem with learning. Typically though the school will detect them at about the age of six, seven or eight. So there's a big gap between when people know about a problem and when it comes to the attention of professionals and systems. Many of those children are those who actually have the difficulty making the transition to school. Tragically school actually exacerbates some of the problems that those children have because of the delay in recognising their problems.
Early interventions that target high risk children are also needed. What is needed is an approach to prevention that starts with universally available community services like high quality childcare, preschool, parenting support, health surveillance, health monitoring. Prevention at the secondary level involves community services and child and family support, among other things. Then indicated prevention is what people typically call early intervention, but it's indicated prevention and that's the intensive approach for children who have really clear-cut problems or are in an area or location that means that they're at higher risk. This is why things like the Australian Early Development index are very important in terms of picking up, within a community, children at risk.
If one looks at the use of formal care from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children data, it shows that essentially those children who are in the lower socioeconomic position are less likely to be interacting with the early childhood services. So we know that early childhood service provision is important, but it's least likely that the children who need it most are getting to it.
If one looks - another way of looking at this - childcare use by infants again shows a gradient by socioeconomic position, and this applies across childcare types. Of course it is more likely families of children in disadvantage rely on unregulated, informal care of arguable quality. Some could be quite good and some could be very problematic. The same thing applies in terms of childcare use by two to three-year-olds, that the children in the lowest SES group are the least likely to engage.
The potential benefits of a social inclusion agenda include, as I've argued, the broadening of the definition of disadvantaged, beyond exclusively looking at poverty. I don't want, in any way, to suggest that poverty isn't important, but poverty is only part of the story. We need to focus the social inclusion agenda on the most disadvantaged because the distressing and depressing thing is that those most disadvantaged families may, if we don't address the problems, be those who are most disadvantaged in a generation, or their children will be.
Bringing greater policy coherence and focus, the connected issues require joined up solutions and emphasising the importance of addressing the multiple barriers that disadvantage presents. It's not just a single thing, it's not just a barrier to employment, it's a barrier to educational participation, and it's a barrier to relationship formation. The probability that a man will form a long term relationship with another person is related to social address and in the Australian situation, a hundred years ago it was the same story.
Potential benefits of a social inclusion agenda include also highlighting the localised nature of disadvantage and the multiple disadvantages that apply and identifying the role of social institutions in systematically excluding some groups or communities.
It's easy to overlook the cumulative nature of disadvantage, to go back to stereotyping a particular group and slip towards the American language of the under-class. Stigmatising groups in particular communities is a concern. There are suburbs in Melbourne or Sydney or Brisbane, and all you have to do is say the name of the suburb and people have an association that that's a place where X or Y people live.
It struck me as interesting, when I used to do work on integration of children with disabilities, I heard a principal in a school once say to me that he was very proud of the integration programme they had and the mainstreaming programme that allowed opportunity and access to the school. He took me out to the playground, he pointed across the playground and said, "oh they're our included children, all in one group, all separated from the rest!". Stigmatising groups is an important thing to avoid and that's a danger in this agenda that can happen.
Distinguishing between what's called the deserving and the undeserving poor, I don't think we should return to that sort of language, diffusing responsibility for addressing the problems. Because it's multifaceted, you can get to a point where people don't focus on the collective nature of responsibility and the need for coordination of multiple services.
There's a problem that Zoe Morrison points out in her doctoral work in the UK, that can regenerate disadvantaged areas and all you do is you move people out into other areas where in fact you know, what one should be doing is essentially thinking about the way in which social programs are designed in a way that doesn't allow participation by people who are disadvantaged and they're not in a position to compete, for example, for funds that are available for regeneration of the community just because of the incapacity limitations.
Sometimes, of course, programs are simply relabelled without reforming and coordinating them better or addressing the needs of the excluded. So instead of doing this, we simply get a label that's applied and shifting policy attention away from other forms of inequality, including income and equality.
Of course as we start to build our approach in this country, we need to realise there is a very wide range of policy areas that potentially can bear on the reduction of social exclusion and the increase in the level of participation and input. In order to reduce social exclusion, you need both active intervention programmes and widespread preventive policies such as that public health triangle I showed you indicates. Of course the focus does need to be on not exacerbating the numbers of people who move into deep social exclusion and certainly addressing the intergenerational aspects of it.
The features of a productive approach that I would point to are addressing multiple disadvantages that are experienced by those who are excluded, recognising that those who are excluded often are least likely to access the conventional services, so there's a problem: the services are there but not necessary engaging with the right people.
I've been very interested in the Clementi program, for example, that was first offered by Harvard University and it reintroduced on a pro bono basis higher educational opportunities to people who were homeless and it's been used, for example, in parts of Sydney. What you start to do is reengage people in education. They won't go to a traditional university but you take the university to them on the streets.
It's interesting when one thinks of the NEWPIN programme that Uniting Care Burnside offers and the way in which people who've been in families where there's a high risk of child abuse, where typically the mother or the father have disengaged from education, had limited capacity to move into employment. With the sorts of scaffolding and mentoring the NEWPIN does, there are wonderful examples of people who have moved back into education, who have reengaged with it.
I met a woman who had been in a terrible life situation, she'd been abused at the age of three, she'd been in foster care, she'd been abused sexually in foster care, she had got to the point where she was living a life that was completely chaotic. But she's reengaged and she's about to graduate as a social worker and take her skills and work with other people.
Change can occur. Mobility is the engine of opportunity. Of course centralised and coordinated targets and monitoring, and localised coordination of government and non-government organizations are needed. I think of the work The Smith Family is doing through Learning For Life where mentors keep children from disadvantaged backgrounds engaged with education and it's wonderful each year to go to the graduation of that to see children who finish high school and children who move from high school to university and graduate. These things are so important.
I don't know how many people in the room are the first generation of their family who have gone to university, I certainly am and that's been one of the great opportunities. Our parents' backgrounds do not in fact predict our life pathways and achievements. So it's good if birth, family and neighbourhood are not destiny. They should not be. What should differentiate us are talent, ability, hard work and use of opportunity.
Implementing social inclusion needs to be a lifespan exercise. I think as important early childhood is, important as the preparation is, it's naïve to think that you don't need to provide supports to keep people include across time and that you need to work with multiple generations. This is an exercise that has to happen between government, the non profit sector and the community and there's a vital role, I think, for local government in this space. Changing attitudes, values and beliefs of those experiencing exclusion and the broader community is one of the things that will have to underpin it.
I thought the headline in one of the local papers was interesting, that Diana Smart's work revealed a crisis for youth. Now it's a great headline, but it's not the reality of the data. The data tell a different story. Most young people are doing well. Most young people now are doing better than they were three years ago and most young people are doing the things that they want to do. But you need to get a handle on those who aren't.
Developing the evidence base is important and performance measures to tell us how we're progressing against this so we don't slip into the fact where someone will stand at this lecture in a hundred years from now and tell us that the problem is even deeper or it's the same people who are excluded or it's the same neighbourhoods involved.
Some tentative conclusions: we require webs of services and packages of policies. We've got to get an integrated approach, integration horizontally across areas of policy priority like education, health, housing, needs to be connected and joined up. But you also need vertical policy integration and that's thinking across a lifespan and how things span a generation. I think there are three pillars of social inclusion: accessible lifelong learning that gives you opportunities for developing your capabilities and moving into employment, having a good chance of doing that; social and economic mobility; and family and relationship support. So I think those three things are among those that I would place priority on.
Finally, I think the priorities for us should be that we reduce social disorganisation, we start to address the neighbourhoods and communities where that's a problem, we enhance mobility of people, we remain a nation whose people are mobile and are not subject to entrenched inequality that spans generations and ruins lives. Facilitating personal agency and participation is particularly important. I don't think that it's a good thing to have approaches that dis-empower people.
I like the approach in Mexico where payments are made to people as rewards for things like their involvement in inoculation programmes, the retention of children at school, the involvement of children in going on to high school. It's an approach that gives the agency to the family and builds community capacity and cohesion. But I think as a society we have to face the fact that this is something that is collectively our responsibility. It's not the fact that a divided nation can really solve these problems. A nation that faces its collective responsibility is I think what's needed if Australians are not to increase the extent to which some of us are socially excluded.
Thank you very much.
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