Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
PROFESSOR BRYAN
RODGERS, PROFESSOR
JUDY DUNN,
DR LEON
FEINSTEIN AND
DR AMANDA
WADE
12 JULY 2006
Q1 Chairman: Can I welcome Dr Leon Feinstein,
Dr Amanda Wade, Professor Judy Dunn and Professor Bryan Rodgers
to our deliberations and thank them very much. We are always very
grateful when witnesses can come at relatively short notice, particularly
Professor Rodgers, we have been hanging on for you because you
are mainly in Australia, I understand.
Professor Rodgers: That is right,
yes.
Q2 Chairman: So it is very good to
catch you when you are in the country. We can make people come
and give evidence, but not if they are in Australia. Thousands
of arms will not go that far, they will not allow us to have the
handcuffs on the plane! It is good we have all four of you here
together, and thank you very much for that. This is an area that
we have been looking at. I have just said outside that this is
not an area where we have decided to hold a full inquiry yet,
but we have the responsibility to scrutinise the Every Child
Matters programme across many departments and we take that
responsibility seriously. The Committee has an interest in the
impact of family breakdown and important trends in family patterns
and their influence on educational impact, so this is a probing
session. We are meeting the Minister, Beverly Hughes, later on
in the year, so we will take much of what we learn today to make
us more dangerous in our questions to her, and then we will decide
what we are going to do. Can I give you all a chance to introduce
yourselves and say what you think the main theme should be today,
what we should not miss out on? Professor Dunn, can I start with
you?
Professor Dunn: Yes, I must say
that when I was asked to come to answer questions about educational
achievement and family change my first reaction was that I do
not focus particularly on educational achievement but what I look
at is a much broader range of adjustment and well-being factors
in children. I think what is important is to do longitudinal research,
because snapshots of children going through this constellation
of changes that happen when parents separate may give us misleading
evidence, so my work has been longitudinal. It has also been based
within the framework of the Avon Study of parents and children,
which is a very large-scale study of a community that is pretty
much representative of the UK, slightly low on minority representation,
but broad enough to look at some of the broad, demographic issues
that feed into how children come through family change. The only
other thing I would say is that there has been so much research
on the impact of parental separation and children's outcome all
over the world and it is great that you have got Bryan Rodgers
here because he is on top of all that data globally. One of the
things is that, whichever study you are looking at, there are
small, average differences in children's adjustment, suggesting
that children are at risk for more problems after their parents
have separated and all those accompanying changes, but the second
thing is that individual differences are enormous, so that the
smaller, average changes do not tell us very much that is useful
predictively about a particular child, and one of the things we
have been looking at is how children in the same family respond
to what is apparently a shared family effect, and those differences
are very marked. I think it is very important to keep your mind
open about individual differences in how children react and to
follow them longitudinally.
Q3 Chairman: We have a totally open
mind on this but we are interested not just in the causal link
between family break-up and educational performance, obviously
covering Every Child Matters (and we recently, last week,
published a report on special educational needs) but rather more
holistically than narrowly educational, so you are very welcome
with your expertise. The Avon Study, is that related to the longitudinal
study based at Bristol University?
Professor Dunn: Yes, it is that
study. It is 10,000 families that were initially recruited when
the mothers were pregnant.
Q4 Chairman: But a long time ago?
Professor Dunn: The children are
now 15, I think.
Chairman: We did visit Bristol University
when I first became the Chair of Committee and talked to the people.
Professor Dunn: It is a wonderful
archive.
Q5 Chairman: There are two of you who
have been involved in that in the past, are there not?
Professor Dunn: Leon has been.
Dr Feinstein: I have been.
Professor Dunn: One other thing
that I think is very important in this whole area of family break-up
is the role of the non-resident parent, that is, in most cases,
the father. A lot of the research that we have done comes out
consistently with findings that, where children have close affectionate
relationships with their non-resident fathers, rather than the
frequency of contact, which is what has been usually studied,
it is the quality of the relationship that matters, and that makes
an independent contribution to how well they do, and my bet would
be that includes school achievement. We have looked more broadly.
Q6 Chairman: Thank you for that.
Professor Rodgers.
Professor Rodgers: Thank you for
the invitation. I try to get back to the UK as often as I can,
so I hope you will have a few more of these meetings so I can
come again. My background covers both some original researches
into the British Birth Cohort Studies as well as reviews of the
literature covering a much broader range, a geographical range
of studies and also broad topic areas. It extends far beyond the
educational issues that you are focusing on, but, like Judy, I
think many of the conceptual issues, the methodological issues
and the broad conclusions are very similar across different areas
of interest, whether it is educational outcomes, whether it is
behavioural features of children or even very long-term outcomes,
which has been my primary focus, how kids eventually develop as
adults and their own relationships, their work and so on. Clearly
the educational system is concerned with those very long-term
outcomes and not just in the here and now, so I think that is
relevant. I think like Judy too, it is a vast research literature
if you are looking at associations between family structure or
family change and children's progress, but as soon as you shift
from those simple associations to saying, "Why does this
happen?", suddenly the number of studies shrinks alarmingly.
It is very easy to bash off simple, correlational findings from
studies, small scale or large scale, but to pursue in more depth
how those issues arise, what the developmental pathways involved
are is a much more complex thing, and the literature is still
sparse on a number of very key issues, I think. ALSPAC, I think,
is an important study. As I say, I have worked on the British
Birth Cohorts, but if ALSPAC is getting a bit long in the tooth,
then the National Birth Cohorts are much, much older and less
relevant to the current educational context. I thought it was
great that Judy could come along (and Leon too) to give clues
about that study. There are a couple of important things that
I always like to put upfront when we talk about the effects of
family breakdown on children, and researchers are very bad at
explaining what they mean by that and it can cause huge confusion.
I think the first thing that is fundamental to understand is that
the immediate effects of a family break-up. We could see adults
and children being upset by that change, for the kids it can involve
no longer living day-to-day with at least one parent and many
other changes around that and it is very upsetting. The issues
involved in that short-term reaction, that could be a year, two
years, there could be a number of changes, it is not just one
simple transition, but it is a completely different issue as to
what the factors are that dictate long-term outcomes. If you start
to look ahead three, four, five, ten years, then the factors involves
in that are very different. You are no longer talking about the
acute upset of family change; there are a lot of other factors
involved. Something that comes out from a broad review of the
literature in this area is that essentially the factors that determine
children's long-term outcomes after a family has separated are
pretty much the same factors that apply in families that stay
together. It is the same things that are involved; it is just
that they occur to a different extent in families that divorce.
You see other sorts of adversity in families that separate. You
see abuse of children to a greater degree, you see financial hardship,
particularly for lone parent families, and you have to understand
the sort of broader features. A second misunderstanding, I think,
that arises with research in this area is what people simply mean
by the phrase "the effects of family breakdown on children".
Some researchers would refer to that as being the actual separation
of the family. The effects of family breakdown would be specific
to that. Some would take it to be anything that might arise subsequent
to family breakdown. So, if family breakdown led to financial
hardship, that would be seen as a knock-on effect and could then
impact on the children; but some researchers think of the whole
process, they talk about separation as a process, and they include
all the things that might happen even before the family separates,
all the conflict for many years preceding separation. So, different
researchers might mean different things by that deceptively simple
phrase "the effects of breakdown on the children", and
I think, just to keep our heads clear of these issues, those two
things, first of all the short-term verses the long-term distinction
and, secondly, what is meant by the effects of separation on children,
it is very important to keep those two thoughts in mind all the
way through.
Q7 Chairman: While we have got you
here, we have just finished, as I said, this Report on special
educational needs, and something that came up regularly when we
talked to lone parents was the effect on a family of having a
child particularly with severe special educational needs. Is there
quite a good cadre of research on what happens to families who
have a child with a disability or special educational needs?
Professor Rodgers: I hesitate
to dive in because my Masters dissertation was on a topic very
close to this, and that was in 1978, so I suspect I am way out
of date on that, but generally with child development we have
a model of often considering what impacts family contests have
on children and forget that kids have an impact on parents and
the broader family. We do know that with all sorts of disabilities—physical
disabilities, other things that produce chronic strains on a family—can
lead to family separation, so the problems can actually arise
within the children and impact on the family members. That is
a huge issue.
Q8 Chairman: We had better not go
there then, Professor Rodgers.
Professor Rodgers: Just that one
little thought is worth bearing in mind, I think. In this field
I think we know, certainly at the time when I was looking at kids
in special schools, and there were more of them then before mainstreaming
was such a major thing, that there were high rates of family separation
involved in those kids in those special schools.
Q9 Chairman: As a man I find it rather
depressing talking to a lot of families that it is obviously the
male part of the partnership who could not take the stress and
disappeared. However, Dr Wade.
Dr Wade: Again, thank you for
inviting me. Like Judy, I was a bit concerned that my experience
is not in the area of educational attainment, and so I was not
sure how relevant my research would be to your inquiries. I am
a social work lecturer and I am also a family sociologist and
the research that I have done in the area of parental separation
and divorce is qualitative, which means that I have carried out
in-depth interviews mainly with children concerning their experiences
of separation and divorce; so the sort of data that I have been
able to collect is very rich and also very nuanced, and what it
does really is highlight the diversity of children's experiences.
I think where that would lead me is, firstly, to suggest that
possibly you reconsider framing your inquiries in terms of family
breakdown, partly because the term itself is somewhat negative
and implies negative experiences and also it implies that there
is something there in the first place that was solid that could
be broken. If you like, it represents a normative understanding
of parental separation which infers that there have been two parents
who have had a longish-standing, mutually satisfying relationship
in which they have brought up their children but where that relationship
at some point becomes less satisfying and ends. From the research
which I have done with Carol Smart and Bren Neale into separation
and divorce, that only reflects the experiences of some families
and some children and parental separation can mean very different
things. There are some children whose parents never lived together
in the first place, although they may have had some shared involvement
with the children. There are other children whose families have
been very fluctuating and involve frequent changes of adults and
who have very complex step and half-sibling relationships and
may be cared for by a social father who has no biological relationship
with any of the children. Again, I think I would suggest that
what you need is quite a lot of information about what parental
separation does mean in the lives of children today. Taking the
children whose experiences do reflect more the normative picture,
again calling it "family breakdown" does not necessarily
reflect how the children see it, because they see their experiences
as quite normal in today's society. However, of course there are
others who go through periods of distress while those changes
are taking place, but, again, like Bryan was saying, what you
see is a process where the children's family will change and then
over time it will reform in different ways, and how children react
to that may depend on things like the frequency of the changes
they experience, the amount of time that is involved, et cetera.
One of the other things that I would suggest you look at is maybe
longitudinal qualitative research. A lot of the qualitative research
that has been done has really been a single point in time, and
I think what we need are studies where we can follow up in this
detailed way what happens in people's lives over time.
Chairman: Thank you.
Q10 Mr Wilson: Just a quick question
to understand where you are coming from. I understand there are
lots of different family structures out there, I think we all
do, but is it a positive thing that families should stay together
in this day and age, in your view?
Dr Wade: I think it depends on
what that family is like from the child's point of view. The other
thing that I had wanted to say was that, if you talk about family
breakdown, what that can do is lead us into thinking that it is
a specific thing that is quite different from some of the other
things that Bryan referred to. Again, what some of the children
were saying to us is that a separation between the adults who
care for them might be only one of a number of problems that they
were facing. They might be experiencing the adults' unemployment,
chronic ill health, imprisonment, there might be domestic violence
in the families, and so that suggests that rather than considering
family violence as one thing, parental separation and divorce
as another, unemployment as another, we have to look at where
those intersect. That then brings me back to your question. Is
it a good thing for families to stay together or not? I would
say it depends on the quality of the relationships within that
family. Where relationships have been good, then children will
report sadness, upset, anxiety if that family looks as though
the parents might separate. Where there has been chronic or sustained
violence or difficulties of that sort, then it can be a relief
from the child's perspective that that does not continue. As I
say, we are not talking about something that is homogenous; the
families themselves are complex and different.
Q11 Mr Wilson: I understand that
there are extremes within all families, but in the main is it
a positive thing that families try to stay together or not, in
your view, or is it just on each case you should look at it?
Dr Wade: I do not think that it
is possible to make those sorts of simple statements. In an ideal
world, I think all of us would feel that children would benefit
by being brought up by two parents to whom they are related and
who care for them, but we do not live in an ideal world. For those
children who are in that fortunate situation, any ending of that
family would be distressing.
Q12 Chairman: Dr Feinstein, you have
not had a chance to say anything yet.
Dr Feinstein: Let me say, first
of all, I work for a research centre, I am a director of a research
centre that is funded by the Department for Education and Skills.
One thing that I would add into the discussion is a bit of context,
I suppose, in terms of the importance of family structure or family
breakdown as a risk factor, amongst other risk factors, in terms
of the explanation of children's educational success and wider
outcomes, but my main research area of interest is the social
class attainment gap as a generic issue, and there are a number
of elements to that, and also in terms of differences between
different sorts of groups within society in terms of educational
achievement and wider outcomes. I would want to mention that the
research that we have done in this area has been a review of all
of the factors that people might put forward as mediating or explaining
social class, the attainment gap or differences between different
groups in society in terms of educational success and wider outcomes.
There is a whole range of different factors that people might
look at and of those factors family structure is, I would say,
a relatively unimportant factor in terms of explaining for the
average person the difference that you might observe between low
income and high income groups in terms of their educational success.
A family breakdown is not going to be the key factor in that context,
or, if you look at say the 20% lowest attaining children in school,
you would not think, looking at that group, that family breakdown
or family structure was the key thing and that, if you dealt with
that, that is going to solve the problems for the lowest 20%.
There are a lot of other factors that are going to explain the
outcomes of a larger proportion of low-attainers. Having said
that, one of the things that the research emphasises, and other
people have made this point, is that, firstly, it is dangerous
to talk about the average. There are, in fact, no average children.
The average child, the average family may not exist. It is a statistical
cut through the very great complexity and diversity that is experienced
out there in the world, and there may be some children, in fact
there will be some children and families, for whom family breakdown
is a key factor. I think in an "Every Child Matters"
context that is an important point to make that family breakdown
matters but it does not matter for everybody who experiences it,
and I think the policy needs to think about the subtleties that
that implies in terms of how you develop services and supports
and interventions for the children for whom family breakdown is
a particularly salient matter as a policy question. If I can make
one other point, family breakdown and family structure, the two
terms are related. Family breakdown, being the transition of a
dynamic of family structure, is a risk factor but in longitudinal
analysis—. I have looked at this in the 58 Birth Cohort,
in the 70 Birth Cohort in the ALSPAC Avon Study, it is also being
looked at in the Millennium Cohort Study, in the longitudinal
study of young people and, in fact in the 46 Birth Cohort, so
you can look at this historically across all the UK datasets.
As a single measure, as I was saying before, family structure
will not be the biggest predicted by any means, but it is a risk
factor. It is something that is observed, and the question that
other people have referred to as well is: what is underlying the
association that you may well find between family structure or
family breakdown and children's attainments? A lot of analyses
that I have seen show that when you take account of income, you
can knock out a lot of the association of family structure, breakdown
to children's attainment, a lot of the effect there is mediated
by income.
Q13 Chairman: So, a Clintonesque
expression of this is that it is "poverty stupid", is
it?
Dr Feinstein: Family breakdown
may lead to poverty, so which is the causal factor? It is not
entirely straightforward.
Q14 Chairman: You seem to be saying,
interpreting what you have said up to now, that you would be much
more concerned at the relationship between under achievement and
income (poverty) than the breakdown of particular family structure?
Dr Feinstein: I would say that
there are a range of risk factors that matter in terms of children's
outcomes of which family structure is one. It does not exist in
isolation; so it matters particularly when it occurs in combination
with other risk factors of which low income will be a key one,
but there will be others as well. I just want to say, as other
people have said, what matters in terms of family breakdown may
be that it is a proxy measure, it is an indicator of other features
of family risk, particularly the quality of the relationships
in the family that have gone before that. To think about another
example that I know people are talking a lot about now, looked
after children, you can see that looked after children have much
worse outcomes. The question is: is that the effect of being looked
after or is that the effect of what led to the children being
taken into care in the first place? Family breakdown, in many
instances, may be a similar set of processes. There are families
that are in some senses not working effectively, the quality of
the relationship is not good, so there is family breakdown, but
what is it that is driving the effects for the children? That
will be different in different cases.
Chairman: One wonders, before divorce
was really a possibility for many people, about the quality of
some relationships that had to be endured. My own maternal great
grandmother was so desperate with her abusive husband that she
disappeared to Australia where, I understand, she lived happily
ever after.
Q15 Jeff Ennis: I am interested in
what Dr Feinstein is saying in terms of the so-called risk factors
of which family breakdown is just one. Is it possible, Dr Feinstein,
and I think you have partially answered this, to rank the risk
factors in order of importance, shall we say? Obviously, poverty
would rank higher than family breakdown in your opinion. Are there
any other factors that would rank higher than family breakdown?
Dr Feinstein: Can I make a little
caveat before I do that kind of exercise, which is to say that
it is a question of what you mean by important, because there
are some things that have very wide prevalence, lots of people
have them and so they will explain lots of the outcomes. There
are other things that are very rare, but if you have them they
are very bad. It is a question of what is your interest. Is it
in the 25% lowest achieving children or the—
Q16 Jeff Ennis: We still start with
that, the long tail of under achievement that we have got in this
country.
Dr Feinstein: I would say that
from our review the key factors, and they interact, would include
family income, parental education, prior educational success of
the parents and cognitions, which is to say values, beliefs, aspirations,
expectations in the family, and, finally, family processes, which
is to say the kinds of interactions between parents and the children.
Those are key factors. They all interact and interrelate. We have
reviewed about 25 to 30 different risks factors. Those are quite
broad, but those are the key things. Income would be one, mental
illness is another.
Q17 Mr Chaytor: Could I ask, first
of all, about the incidence of divorce and separation over time
in the UK and, secondly, the relationship between rates of divorce
and separation and social class. I would like to get a picture
of why this appears to have been a much bigger issue in recent
years than previously. I am not sure who is the best person to
answer?
Professor Rodgers: There is a
similarity across England and Wales that the divorce statistics
apply to specifically. Australia, New Zealand and Canada have
had very similar divorce rates historically and changes in those
rates have been very close to each other across those particular
countries.
Q18 Mr Chaytor: I am sorry, England,
Wales, Australia, New Zealand and Canada?
Professor Rodgers: They are all
very similar in terms of their trends in divorce rates over time.
There were particularly rapid rises in divorce rates across many
countries in the post-war period. There is a bit of a tendency
now—certainly in Australia we see headlines about increasing
divorce rates all the time—for people to talk about divorce
rates increasing when in fact they have been relatively stable
for quite a number of years now and certainly reached a plateau
in England and Wales some years back, but what that has meant
now is that we now have children who have come to the end of childhood
where they have lived through a period when divorce rates have
been high all the way through their life and with that plateau
about a quarter of children will experience separation of their
original parents through their first 16 years of life, and that
is a pretty robust statistic across those countries that I mentioned.
So, if you just think of that, one in four kids experience separation
of their parents, that is, I think, the best handle to look at
it from a child's perspective. Many divorces happen to couples
who do not have kids, so you do not want to get too hooked up
in figures on divorce rates and the proportion of marriages that
have ended in divorce. Think of it as what proportion of kids
experience that.
Q19 Mr Chaytor: In terms of today's
school age children, there has been no significant change to divorce
and separation rates during the period at which they have been
at school, today's 5-16-year-olds?
Professor Rodgers: Not in this
recent time. That has now pretty much reached a plateau.
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