Child commissioner's human rights warning on disabled girlBy Maria DavidBBC NewsPoppy Blewett-Silcock has a rare condition called Warberg Micro Syndrome, that has left her blind, unable to walk or speak and needing to be tube-fed
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The children's commissioner for Wales has warned that a council and a health board could be breaching a 10-year-old disabled girl's human rights.

Poppy Blewett-Silcock's parents say they need more support from social services or the NHS to help care for her in Machen, near Caerphilly.

Commissioner Keith Towler said the failure to resolve the situation was a potential breach.

The Welsh government said it was taking action to address issues in this area.

Continue reading the main story“Start QuoteWe really are caught between the two, effectively arguing about their budgets”

Craig Blewett-SilcockPoppy's father
BBC Radio Wales' Eye on Wales programme has found that other families in need could be falling through cracks in the care system.

Poppy has a rare condition called Warberg Micro Syndrome that has left her blind, unable to walk or speak and needing to be tube fed. She requires 24-hour care.

Poppy's parents Tymandra and Craig care for her at home and need more support but social services and the NHS say they cannot help.


Caerphilly council provides one overnight stay a fortnight for Poppy at a care facility and a few hours with a sitter each month.

But Mr and Mrs Blewett-Silcock said Poppy could not go to the overnight facility when she was very ill, leaving them exhausted and without a break.

They want to move to a system called direct payments, which would give them a set budget to arrange the care best suited to Poppy's needs, but this has been turned down.

'Continual struggle'"Social services say that they will not pay for someone to tube feed her because that is a nursing need, whereas the other side, the nursing side of things, are saying no - it's not a health need," said Mr Blewit-Silcock.

Continue reading the main story“Start QuoteIt is important to acknowledge that the assessed needs of all children referred to us for care provision are already being met”

Caerphilly council and Aneurin Bevan Health Board
"We really are caught between the two, effectively arguing about their budgets.

"It's a continual struggle and a fight, and the strain. There's enough strain on a family anyway, but the strain of having to fight your case with people who have just got their blinkers on."

He said respite time was essential for him, his wife and Poppy.

Mr Towler said a failure to resolve the situation could be a breach of Poppy's human rights.

"My job is to stand up and speak out on behalf of children and to do that I use the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child," he said.

"If a child is failing to receive a service or its failing to be protected, or to have their voice heard, that would be a breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

"So from any child's perspective, when adults are arguing over who should pay what, my position is very clear. This child has an entitlement and if there are issues over funding then we'll resolve that later."

'Taking action'In a joint statement, Caerphilly council and Aneurin Bevan Health Board said: "It is important to acknowledge that the assessed needs of all children referred to us for care provision are already being met.

Continue reading the main story“Start QuoteIf a child is failing to receive a service or its failing to be protected, or to have their voice heard, that would be a breach of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child”

Keith TowlerChildren's commissioner for Wales
"We acknowledge and share parents' frustrations in the current gaps in national legislation around direct payments concerning disabled children, and we look forward to working with Welsh government and other partners to address this issue."

Health Minister Mark Drakeford said there were issues in this area which the Welsh government was aware of and which "we are taking action to address, but I recognise we still have work to do".

He added: "We are committed to undertaking a review of the national framework and arrangements for continuing health care to ensure that people receive the appropriate care they need and that health boards operate this in an appropriate and timely manner."

Mr Drakeford said the role of respite care would be considered as part of the "reforms for carers which are being introduced as part of the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Bill".

There are more than 370,000 carers across Wales, according to the Carers Wales charity.

A new report by the United Nations Children’s Fund, on the well-being of children in 35 developed nations, turned up some alarming statistics about child poverty. More than one in five American children fall below a relative poverty line, which UNICEF defines as living in a household that earns less than half of the national median. The United States ranks 34th of the 35 countries surveyed, above only Romania and below virtually all of Europe plus Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

The above map gives a comparative sense of the data. The blue countries have less than 10 percent of its children below UNICEF’s relative poverty line, with the red countries approaching 25 percent. Southern European countries, among the most effected by the euro crisis, have some of the worst rates, although none as low as the United States. Former Soviet countries also score poorly. Northern European countries score the highest. English-speaking countries tend to fall somewhere in the middle.

The poor U.S. showing in this data may reflect growing income inequality. According to one metric of inequality, a statistical measurement called the gini coefficient, the U.S. economy is one of the most unequal in the developed world. This would explain why the United States, on child poverty, is ranked between Bulgaria and Romania, though Americans are on average six times richer than Bulgarians and Romanians.

Here, from the UNICEF report, is the chart of relative child poverty rates (the grey countries are marked separately because they could not provide data for all other indices and are thus not included in the final rankings):

To be clear, this data only reflects developed countries; it tells us nothing about how children in the United States or Europe compare to, for example, children in sub-Saharan Africa. But looking at how developed economies compare can help give us a rough approximation of how these countries are doing at child welfare. And UNICEF is using its own “poverty line” here; the more typical international definition is a family that lives on less than $1.25 or $2 per day. Almost no Americans qualify for this definition. Internally, the United States defines the poverty line as a family living on less than about $22,000 per year, which includes about 15 percent of Americans.

Still, UNICEF’s data is important for measuring the share of children who are substantively poorer than their national average, which has important implications for the cost of food, housing, health care and other essentials. Its research shows that children are more likely to fall below this relative poverty line in the United States than in almost any other developed country.

But the picture looks even worse when you examine just how far below the relative poverty line these children tend to fall. The UNICEF report looks at something it calls the “child poverty gap,” which measures how far the average poor child falls below the relative poverty line. It does this by measuring the gap between the relative poverty line and the average income of poor families.

Alarmingly, the United States also scores second-to-last on this measurement, with the average poor child living in a home that makes 36 percent less than the relative poverty line. Only Italy has a wider gap. Here’s the chart for child poverty gaps:

Late in his State of the Union address, U.S. President Barack Obama made a bold claim: "In many places, people live on little more than a dollar a day. So the United States will join with our allies to eradicate such extreme poverty in the next two decades." The question naturally becomes: Can we really end extreme poverty in the next two decades? Can the world collectively achieve a bare minimum standard of living embraced by every country around the globe


The answer, by and large, is yes.

While some may not have seen the president's remarks coming, they are built upon ongoing discussions with the United Nations and all of its member states regarding how best to follow up on the existing Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which run through 2015. TheMDGs are broadly viewed as a success, and they represent a very rare creature in international diplomatic circles -- one in which sweeping rhetoric was actually accompanied by practical, ambitious, and very measurable goals and targets to tackle key elements of extreme poverty: including reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, and reducing hunger. Not only did the world commit to some very big-ticket items in the MDGs, it committed itself to measure its progress toward these goals using hard and publicly accessible data.

The Millennium Declaration, signed in September 2000, included eight goals and some 21 targets and was agreed upon by all U.N. member states. The first goal was to halve the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day, the widely accepted mark at the time for extreme poverty. (The extreme poverty level was subsequently adjusted by the World Bank to $1.25 in 2005.)

The world has done well in meeting this broad goal. The number of people living on less than $1.25 per day was roughly halved between 2000 and 2010, and 2012 marked the first year that both the absolute number of people living in extreme poverty and rates of poverty fell in every developing region, including in sub-Saharan Africa. Other goals, particularly reducing maternal mortality, have been harder to meet, but have also shown significant progress.

But it is also important to note that progress toward these broad goals was very uneven, not only across regions and countries, but within individual countries themselves. Enormous economic gains in China and India accounted for much of the reduction in the overall extreme poverty numbers, while Africa has lagged. Even in countries that made significant gains, traditionally disenfranchised populations were often left behind simply by dint of gender, ethnicity, or geographic location.

The profile of where the poorest of the poor reside has also shifted considerably. Whereas in 1990, 80 percent of the world's poor lived in stable, low-income countries, today roughly half of the world's poor live in stable middle-income countries, while 41 percent of the poorest of the poor live in fragile and conflict-affected states. This changing locus of poverty necessitates a two-pronged effort to assist the marginalized poor in middle income states while helping fragile and conflict affected states put in place the basic systems that will help break repeated cycles of crisis and violence.

Poor baby syndrome


Posted: Wednesday, April 10, 2013 10:05 am

By Esther J. Cepeda, Washington Post | 0 comments

Judging by news coverage of the nation's fastest growing ethnic minority, you'd think that "the Hispanic condition" was a pathology. With the exception of growing power in the voting booth, the news makes it seem as though we're all poor, sick and generally unable to cope with life as well as others. 

There are simply too many examples of the negativity that seems to drive reporting on – and perceptions of – the health and economic well-being of Hispanics to list here. But let me illustrate my point with some recent coverage surrounding Latino learners. 

"Mexican-American children lag in pre-literacy skills, but not social strengths, study reveals" was a popular headline based on research from the University of California.  

Consider this eye-popping statement in the university's press release: "The researchers caution teachers, pediatricians and other health care providers to 'not assume social-emotional delays, even when language or cognitive skills lag somewhat behind.'" 

The research found that Mexican-American toddlers ages 2 and 3 displayed language and cognitive skills about eight months behind those of their white peers, whether assessed in English or Spanish. The gap persisted through ages 4 and 5.

This study finally made the environmental connection: While most Mexican-American parents nurture socially agile children, factors such as lower incomes, more children in the home and few family reading traditions usually mean these students will arrive at kindergarten behind their non-Hispanic classmates.

So Mexican-American youngsters aren't less cognitively able than their peers. They are just a little behind because the "read to your children" culture hasn't yet taken hold in their homes. I hope every educator in America gets that memo.

Hispanics have been singled out as the only children in our school systems who can't deal with English-language immersion lest it ruin their psyches, dishonor their ethnic roots, and needlessly challenge them.

In Illinois, children who would learn English as a second language are first taught to read and write – or taught exclusively – in their native tongue. This continues until they can be transitioned, over many years in most cases, into English-speaking classrooms. 

By their native language I mean Spanish, because other immigrant students who show up to school speaking, say, Russian, Polish or Chinese are mainstreamed with only minimal English-as-a-second-language supports. There simply aren't enough of them per grade level to offer special native-language classrooms. It's not often acknowledged that such students, because of that immersion, are usually extremely successful in quickly learning to speak English. 

When I taught "bilingual ed" at a high school, I saw non-Spanish-speaking immigrant students go from zero to near-fluency in English in mere months. Yet I also taught 16-year-old students who had been born in the U.S. but trapped in "bilingual" classrooms their whole lives and still couldn't speak English.

Too frequently, educators get caught up in the "pobrecito syndrome," as in "poor baby, of course he's going to underachieve, he's disadvantaged!"

The steady diet of bad news about segments of the Hispanic population drive a myth that all Latinos are downtrodden, at-risk or simply not as able as others. The next time you see a headline about Latinos' sorry state, flip the script by remembering: There's always, always more to the story.