Lesson 2.NR rga.notebook

1

March 27, 2018

Feb 1911:21 AM

Classroom Expectations:

Arrive on time

Coat off

Bags off desks

Equipment & Planner on desks

Title: The New Right perspective of the family.

1) 3 key bullet points about Functionalist view of the family.2) From what you know already,what can you predict the New Rightperspective will say about the family?

Feb 711:40

The New Right View of the Family

Objective Key WordsKnow

Understand

How will you display SMSC today?Courage ‐ Respect ‐ Friendship ‐ Inspiration ‐ Determination ‐ 

Equality ‐ ExcellenceEmpathy – Courtesy – Resilience  ‐ 

Etiquette

To give reasons and evidence for your views (ext: to consider alternative opinions and views)

To spot patterns and explain what's happening

How might the New Right perspectiveand the Functionalist perspective besimilar?

Title: The New Right perspective of the family.

What are the main arguments of the New Righton the family?

How has the New Right influenced policies within the UK?

To what extent are the arguments of the New Right convincing compared to the Functionalist perspective of the family?

ThatcherismFamily ValuesDependency cultureCharles MurrayBack to BasicsTroubled Families Programme

Feb 166:06 PM

1980s ‐ NR thinkers argued that government policy was undermining the family so policy changes were needed. Their thinking dominated policy development from 1979 to 1997.

‐NR hold the view that there is only one correct or normal family type ‐ the traditional or conventional nuclear family (NF). (Similar to Functionalists)‐NR sees this family as ‘natural’ and based on fundamental biological differences between men and women. In their view, the NF is the cornerstone of society; a place of contentment, refuge and harmony. ‐The decline of the traditional family and the growth of family diversity are the cause of many social problems such as higher crime rates and declining moral standards generally.

"The natural state should be the 2 adult family caring for their children"John Redwood Conservative M.P. 1993

The traditional 2 parent family is best’Michael Howard Conservative Party Leader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzEaNAJB_5Y

The New Right:

Feb 166:48 PM

American Sociologist Charles Murray (new right theorist):‐Viewed ‘excessive’ state welfare payments as creating a dependency culture.

‐Social welfare (social security as it was once known) started out as a safety‐net for people when hit with hard‐times, but has become hijacked by a group of people with no intention of working.

‐Murray saw underclass as their behaviour, a lifestyle choice, a disease which infects people who share many of the following characteristics (female headed lone parents, out‐of‐wedlock‐births, school drop‐outs, violent and criminal).Charles Murray visited the UK in 1989 and said it has a developing underclass.

Murray said: “the underclass are defined by their behaviour. Their homes are littered and unkempt. The men in the family are unable to hold down a job. Drunkenness is common. The children grew up ill‐schooled and ill‐behaved and contribute to a disproportionate share of juvenile delinquents”

How can you disagreewith views of Murray?What evidence is thereto support or refutethis approach to the family?

Feb 166:07 PM

‐NR believe: it is important for children to have a stable home, with married mother and father, and that ideally the wife should be able to stay at home to look after the children.

‐The introduction of the welfare state led to a culture where people depend on hand‐outs from the state and that these encourage single parenting, which in turn, they argue leads to deviancy and a decline in morality.

‐NR thinking encouraged the Conservative government to launch the Back to Basics campaign 1993 to encourage a return to traditional family values. This was criticised for being unsuccessful, and hypocritical due some Conservative MPs being found to be having affairs or being divorced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DCSdExQmQs

Discuss: Was the 'Back to Basics' policy so bad?! What do you think the Conservative policy really meant when it said 'family values' were the best?

‐The New Right in practice:

Feb 199:26 PM

Case study:Tim Yeo was hardly a crucial figure in the Major government, but as a junior minister he was fair game once John Major launched his ‘back to basics’ campaign.

ON BOXING Day 1993, the Mirror broke the news that Yeo had a love child with a Conservative councillor. The child had been born nine months after the Tory conference. Yeo filled the Christmas‐to‐New Year political news vacuum. With his constituency association demanding some kind of sacrifice (they had never warmed to Yeo), he quit as a minister on 5 January.

Can you give evidence ofother examples where policy has been contradicted by certain behaviour?(Application‐ AO2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzEaNAJB_5Yhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DCSdExQmQs

Lesson 2.NR rga.notebook

2

March 27, 2018

Feb 166:08 PM

Evidence for ‘non‐nuclear families’ being a problem.

Children from broken homes are almost five times more likely to develop emotional problems.

Young people whose mother and father split up are also three times as likely to become aggressive or badly behaved.

Lone‐parent families are more than twice as likely to live in poverty as two‐parent families.Children from broken homes are nine times more likely to become young offenders.

Feb 166:52 PM

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ukpolitics10364876

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzEaNAJB_5Y

Thatcherism and New Right:TASK: How might Thatcher's policies have been popular with some and unpopular with others?To what extent do you agree with her about a small state, individual responsibility and a small welfare state?

Feb 166:22 PM

Troubled Families Programme:

Read the sheet and answer the following questions in your book:

1) Why was the TFP established in the first place?2) How were families considered to be trouble determined and how was a successful turnaround of these families determined?3) In two full paragraphs explain two criticisms of the TFP.

The Troubled Families NR.docxThe Troubled Families NR.docx

Feb 166:08 PM

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/oct/17/governments448mtroubledfamiliesschemehashadlittleimpactthinktank

Cost more than £1bn including £450m from central government launched by David Cameron with the aim of tackling “a culture of disruption and irresponsibility” by targeting households with high levels of crime, unemployment, pupil truancy and use of child welfare services.

Recent study concludes that after four years there was no clear evidence that the programme had any serious effect, despite persistent claims by politicians that it had “turned around” the lives of tens of thousands of families and saved over a billion pounds.

The troubled families programme:

Feb 166:08 PM

Criticisms of the New Right:

They exaggerate the decline of the Nuclear family. Most adults still marry and have children. Most children are reared by their two natural parents. Most marriages continue until death. Divorce has increased, but most divorcees remarry.

Feminism – gender roles are socially determined rather than being fixed by biology. Traditional gender roles are oppressive to women.The fact that divorce has become easier is good because without it many women end up being trapped in unhappy or abusive relationships.

Most single parents are not welfare scroungers – most want to work but find it difficult to find jobs that are flexible enough so they can balance work and child care.

Chester argues that the New Right exaggerate the extent of cohabiting and single parent families – most children still spend most of their lives in a nuclear family arrangement or a neo‐conventional family. Most change is from the fact that now most mothers work now as well as fathers.

Feb 166:58 PM

PLENARY

Objective Key Words

Know

Understand

TITLE: The New Right perspective of the family.

Outline the New Right perspective of the family.10 marks.

Key:Thatcherism/Back to Basics/ Charles Murray/family values/single parent families/Family Values/Troubled Families Programme/Chester

What are the main arguments of the New Righton the family?

How has the New Right influenced policies within the UK?

To what extent are the arguments of the New Right convincing compared to the Functionalist perspective of the family?

To give reasons and evidence for your views (ext: to consider alternative opinions and views)

To spot patterns and explain what's happening

ThatcherismFamily ValuesDependency cultureCharles MurrayBack to BasicsTroubled Families Programme

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-10364876https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzEaNAJB_5Yhttps://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/oct/17/governments-448m-troubled-families-scheme-has-had-little-impact-thinktank

Attachments

The Troubled Families NR.docx

The Troubled Families Programme.

The Troubled Families Programme is a good example of a New Right social policy aimed at tackling criminality by targeting the so called underclass, it basically involves local authority workers intervening in so called troubled families in order to get them to take responsibility for their behaviour.

Following the riots in 2011, a new government initiative, the Troubled Families Programme (TFP), was announced, which set out to ‘turn around’ the 120,000 most ‘troubled families’ in England by May 2015.

The second phase of the TFP is now underway, following the ‘successful’ completion of Phase 1. The ‘massive expansion’ of the programme, to include 400,000 more ‘troubled families’, with wider-ranging criteria for inclusion, was announced in July 2013, when only 1 per cent of ‘troubled families’ had been ‘turned around’.

The concept of ‘troubled families’ came into the public consciousness in the aftermath of the English riots in 2011. Structural factors, such as poverty and racial inequality and injustice, were eschewed as possible factors behind the riots in favour of an explanation of ‘pure criminality’. Rioters were, in Cameron’s words, ‘people with a twisted moral code, people with a complete absence of self- restraint’. The blame for the riots, in the governments’ eyes, was split between poor parenting and anti-social families, and an overly generous welfare system that encouraged delinquency

In December 2011, the TFP was launched to help realise Cameron’s ambition to ‘turn round’ the lives of the 120,000 ‘troubled families’

The TFP then, was a policy response designed to not just address the problems caused by ‘troubled families’, but to also completely change the way the state interacted with them. Local authorities were expected to deliver the programme using a ‘family intervention’ approach (DCLG, 2012a) which had been rolled out to 53 areas in England under the previous Labour government’s Respect agenda. This approach sees a single ‘persistent, assertive and challenging’ (ibid) key worker working intensively with the family ‘from the inside out’ to address their problems, encouraging them to take responsibility for their circumstances.

Definitions

‘Troubled families’ were officially defined as those who met three of the four following criteria:

· Are involved in youth crime or anti-social behaviour

· Have children who are regularly truanting or not in school

· Have an adult on out of work benefits

· Cause high costs to the taxpayer

Payment by Results

All 152 local authorities in England ‘signed up’ to take part in the TFP which was to be run on a Payment by Results basis, with local authorities paid an attachment fee for each ‘troubled family’ they worked with, and a further allocation of funding dependent on certain outcomes being met.

Families were deemed to have been ‘turned around’ if:

1. Educational attendance improved above 85%, youth crime reduced by 33% and anti-social behaviour reduced by 60% across the family, or

2. A family member moved off out-of-work benefits and into continuous employment for three or six months, depending on the benefits they were initially receiving (ibid)

Claims for ‘turning around’ ‘troubled families’ were submitted by local authorities on a quarterly basis.

In August 2014, further detail was announced on the expansion of the programme. The ‘new’ ‘troubled families’ were families that met two out of the following six criteria:

· Parents and children involved in crime or anti-social behaviour

· Children who have not been attending school regularly

· Children who need help

· Adults out of work or at risk of financial exclusion and young people at risk of worklessness

· Families affected by domestic violence and abuse

· Parents and children with a range of health problems

In May 2015, the government published figures that showed that local authorities had ‘turned around’ 99 per cent of ‘troubled families’. David Cameron called it a ‘real government success’.

Criticisms of the Troubled Families Programme

The Centre for Crime and Justice is very sceptical about the success-claims made by the government . They actually suggest 10 reasons why we should be suspicious of the 99% success rate, which they call a social policy impossibility, especially in an era of government cuts, but I’m going to focus on just two criticisms, which taken together seem to strongly suggest that the government is simply lying about the effectiveness of the TFP – I mean as in not just manipulating statistics, just literally lying.

How ‘troublesome’ are ‘troubled families’?

In contrast to the image of ‘troubled families’ as ‘neighbours from hell’ where drug and alcohol addictions, crime and irresponsibility ‘cascade through generations’, an interim report from the national evaluation of the TFP (DCLG, 2014b) shows that in ‘troubled families’:

· 85% ‘had no adults with a criminal offence in the previous six months

· 97% had children with one or zero offences in the previous six months

· 84% had children who were not permanently excluded from school

· 26% had at least one adult in work

· 93% had no adults clinically diagnosed as being dependent on alcohol

The only characteristics shared by the majority of ‘troubled families’ are that they are white, not in work, live in social housing and have at least one household member experiencing poor health, illness and/or a disability. Crime, anti-social behaviour and substance abuse, even at relatively low levels, are all characteristics which relate to small minorities of official ‘troubled families’.

Secondly, we don’t actually know if lives really been ‘turned around’?

When many ‘troubled families’ experience unemployment and poor health, and some of them also experience issues such as domestic violence, it is unclear to what extent their lives will have been ‘turned around’ by the programme.

Only 10 per cent of all ‘turned around’ families gained work and, as noted above, no detail is known about the quality or security of that work.

Changes to educational attendance and anti-social behaviour/crime levels within households accounted for around 90 per cent of the ‘turned around’ families, but government figures show that the majority of ‘troubled families’ had children who were already attending school and were not committing large amounts of crime or anti-social behaviour on entry into the programme.

Furthermore, we do not know how many ‘turned around’ families are still experiencing domestic violence, poor mental health or other issues such as poor quality or overcrowded housing, poverty or material deprivation, because this information has not been reported by the government.

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