Rethinking disadvantage in Wales: It’s the stress not just the money

Finola Wilson

We measure educational disadvantage by poverty. We are told that pupils who are growing up in financially poor households need more money to succeed at school.

But what if this isn’t the real story? What if the lack of money isn’t the real issue?

The real story about disadvantage and the link with socio-economic status is not the lack of finances, it’s what not having enough money to live well does to the brains of the children who grow up in those households.

And that has serious implications for the Welsh Government’s child poverty strategy.

Paying families more is a good start

Around 200,000 children are currently living in poverty in Wales, roughly 28% to 31% of all children across the country. This means that in an average classroom of 30 pupils, about 8 children are living below the poverty line.

The new Plaid Cymru government has made raising children out of poverty a “central and defining mission”. It is proposing an additional £10 payment per child per week, paid to those already receiving Universal Credit as a pilot. Initially this would be for children aged up to six, estimated to include around 15,000 children. Given that this proposal is still at the very early stages, and legislation, pilot design and rollout is yet to happen, the earliest possible start date would likely be the 2027-28 academic year.

In Scotland, the first Scottish Child Payments were made in 2021. Families currently get £28.20 per child, per week. Research has shown that these payments have kept significant numbers of children out of poverty. A cross-nation study found child deprivation would be 8-9 percentage points higher without the Scottish Child Payment. However, there is no strong evidence yet that the payment has significantly narrowed the attainment gap in exam results.

It is worth noting that the Scottish Child Payment also started at £10, so this is not necessarily Wales trying to do things on the cheap.

Paying poorer families more money is a good thing, because it increases family income while reducing food security and material deprivation. But most importantly it reduces financial stress in households with children.

Stress limits learning

Stress has a huge impact on learning. If you are stressed your capacity to learn is reduced. If you are chronically stressed because you are living in a stressful environment, the increase in your stress hormone, or cortisol levels, can have wide-ranging and long-lasting effects. For young children with developing minds, raised cortisol levels can have a catastrophic impact on their readiness to learn, working memory capacity and ability to emotionally regulate.

Young children living in food poverty for example, with stressed caregivers, may have their cortisol levels “running hot”. They will be more prone to emotional dysregulation or “meltdowns”. Chronic childhood stress can lead to a flattened cortisol pattern, with a blunted cortisol response, making it harder to get going in the morning and is often associated with fatigue, reduced motivation, poorer concentrations and sleep difficulties.

Readiness to learn, poor working memory and emotional dysregulation are all impacts that are widely reported by schools across Wales, and not just for the children at the very bottom end of the socio-economic curve. Children are arriving at school visibly tired, emotionally flat or still “mentally at home”. They need repeated reassurance, are slow to engage with starter tasks and have difficulty processing multi-step instructions. Pupils need instructions repeated multiple times, or maybe start the task well, but then forget what they are doing halfway through.

Most challenging for teaching and support staff and for the learners around them, are situations where children are triggered by small events, that lead to outsize reactions, tears, anger or shutdown. More and more children seem unable to cope with the requirement to manage their emotions effectively and “acting out” behaviour is common.

Will Plaid’s proposals help?

So, the question is, will an additional £10 a week solve these problems? The short answer is no. But the additional payment is still worth doing. It will lift many children out of the immediate impacts of food poverty, which can only be a good thing. But it is unlikely to automatically translate into improved attainment and a fix for the very many impacts that schools are having to deal with across Wales.

Beware of politicians who suggest this is the case. Money alone is not the solution.

So, what can be done, right now, for the children who are suffering the effects of the stress that being poor creates? There are three key things that will make the difference:

1. Increase predictability and routine. The more cognitive capacity pupils have to allocate to thinking about what is expected of them today, what the specific rules are for this teacher, this classroom or this task, the less capacity they have for learning.

2. Build strong, regulating relationships. This doesn’t mean, be their best friend, or keep them happy at all times. It means simple things like using their name to greet them, interacting with them positively throughout the day and noticing effort before outcome.

3. Create opportunities for regulation before learning. This is the most important to start first. Children feel the stress in their bodies. They are overwhelmed by the cortisol running through their system. They need to be explicitly taught what to do with those feelings, and how to calm their bodies. These can include breathing techniques, grounding exercises and simple question tasks to aid focus.

Whatever problems children are experiencing, whatever stress responses they display, money alone will not be enough. The fact is that more money will improve the conditions for learning, but on its own will have very limited impact. Teachers and schools in Wales need to recognise and address the widespread and long-term impact of high-cortisol living for our children before they are switched off from school forever.

Finola Wilson is an educator, author and Director of Impact Wales, which works with schools across Wales and beyond.