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
Continue reading the main storyRelated Stories

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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.   

Despite unprecedented levels of government spending to help low-income Americans, a record 46 million people in the United States are living in poverty. In 2011, two thirds of the working-age poor were unemployed for the entire year. Some will argue that more public sector intervention is necessary to reduce poverty. But as we continue to slowly recover from the Great Recession, history shows us that only job gains from stronger economic growth can solve the problem.

A full five years since the start of the recession, the economy continues to underperform. Economic growth has averaged just 2.3 percent growth since the end of the recession in mid-year 2009, not enough to begin a full labor market recovery. There are still more than 100 million working-age people that remain jobless, and wages in 2012 grew at just 1.5 percent, the slowest increase on record and well below the rate of inflation. Based on data from the past two decades, every 1 percent reduction in the poverty rate requires a corresponding 2 percent rise in the share of the working age population with employment.

[See a collection of political cartoons on the economy.]

Since the start of the recession, the number of Americans in poverty has grown by 9 million. This increase has come at a time when government spending on the poor has also reached record levels. In 2011, more than 100 million people lived in households that received some kind of low-income government assistance; spending on these programs at the federal, state, and local level combined now exceeds $1 trillion annually. Government assistance for low-income families now equals a shocking 10 percent of all household spending. 

It has been long recognized that recessions can increase the number of families in poverty, and over the past 20 years it has become clear that the rising and falling poverty rate correlates directly with the jobless rate. The graph below shows this relationship.

Cleveland school hosts nation's first children's rights conference 12:19pm Monday 11th March 2013 in News By Chris Pleasance

CHILDREN from an east Cleveland school will host the nation’s first children’s rights conference.

Pupils aged four to 11 from Whitecliffe Primary School, in Carlin How, will invite 80 students from 18 local schools to their conference on Friday, March 15.

Whitecliffe Primary was praised last year by charity Unicef after receiving a Rights Respecting School Award. They will use the conference to help other schools match their achievement.

Head teacher Chris Shannon said: “Our pupils have been extremely passionate about children’s rights since we got the Unicef award last February and they have done an outstanding job in organising this event. We are all looking forward to a fantastic occasion.”

The conference was thought up by ex-pupils Alex Ayre and Jodie Found who will also MC the event.

The award was for the school’s work in promoting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and encouraging children to become active citizens.

The convention sets out the basic rights for children, including the right to education which must "develop every child’s personality, talents and abilities to the full."

Joan Guy, cabinet member for children’s services and education at Redcar and Cleveland Council, said: “The enthusiasm of the Whitecliffe Primary School pupils for children’s rights issues is tremendous and I’m sure this event will be a great success.”

Alabama passed a school-choice plan last Thursday that The Foundry hails as "historic." The Cato At Liberty blog is almost as optimistic, calling the legislation “a good start” and criticizing only the fact that it may inadvertently encourage schools to waste more time “teaching to the test.”

In brief, the new legislation will allow students who currently attend a “failing” school to attend a “non-failing” school via income tax credits. 

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) plans to sign the bill into law today, but the Alabama Education Association (AEA) has other ideas. They are suing to block Bentley from signing the bill because:

They maintain the bill has several problems, including being so broad that a family zoned for a failing school could get the private school tax credits without even sending a child to the failing school.

The plan defines failing schools as:

…those in the bottom 10 percent on statewide reading and math assessment scores, with three consecutive D’s or one F on the school grading card, or labeled ‘persistently low-performing’ on the state’s School Improvement Grant application.

In other words, when the state-run education system that you’re funding with your tax dollars fails your children for a few years running, you will be permitted to keep a portion of your money to send them to a better school.

It's nothing new for heavily-entrenched public education unions to oppose competition and innovations in teaching methods that can benefit children. The New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) devoted the first two pages of its January 2013 newsletter to bad-mouthing charters and complaining about reform movements.

Groups like the AEA and the NJEA are trying to protect their members from budget cuts and lay-offs. That's what unions were created to do, and they're remarkably good at it. But when that gets in the way of a child's education, it is up to parents and legislators to put them back in their place.

Christian Persecution: Christian Nigeria’s Witness for Jesus in the Face of Boko Haram’s Terrorists » Human Trafficking and Child Labor: Raid of Indian Sweatshop Frees Slaves as Young as 8 December 6, 2012 By Rebecca Hamilton 1 Comment The following Yahoo News article describes a raid on a sweatshop in India where enslaved children, some as young as 8 years, were forced to make Christmas decorations.

Many of these decorations are being sold on eBay. Read the excerpt of the Yahoo News article below for tips on how to avoid buying them yourself. Watch the video on the link at the end of the excerpt for more information.

Police and child advocates broke padlocks and busted down doors in a surprise raid of a sweatshop in India, only to find a group of children imprisoned who had been forced to make Christmas decorations.

The children were kept in rooms approximately six feet by six feet and had been forced to work up to 19-hour days making the decorations, which advocates believe may have been intended to be sold on the cheap in the United States.

Human rights group Global March for Children led the raid, but also got help from former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who now serves as the United Nations special envoy for global education.

The 14 children who were freed are now in the process of being reunited with their families, who are scattered across India.

Brown released video to ABC News and Yahoo! News revealing what he says were the illegal conditions in which the children in Delhi were discovered.

“There is no parent in the world who would ever want their child to be subjected to conditions that you see in these films of children in dingy basements, without air, without food, without proper care, being forced into child labor for all these hours of the day. I think every parent who sees these films will want this practice brought to an end as quickly as possible.”

Child advocates say American consumers would likely never know the origin of goods made with child labor, which Brown says has become a global epidemic that needs to be solved.

In a push to garner more attention on the issue worldwide, Brown’s office released a new report today, “Child Labour and Educational Disadvantage – Breaking the Link, Building Opportunity,” which says 91 million children in the global workforce are younger than 12 years old.

In the case of the children rescued in Delhi, he says they were both injured and scared.

“Some of them are lacerated because they’re working with glass. And we found these children in this basement. They were not being paid,” he said. “They had been trafficked themselves. And they were making these Christmas decorations that were being sold in our shops and our web sites in the West.”

Priyanke Ribhu of Global March says many children in India are often lured away from their parents by gangmasters who befriend their parents in the remote villages where they live. The gangmasters reportedly promise parents their kids will be taken to a better place where they will be provided a real education and many great
opportunities they could not receive in their villages. Parents are also often told the children will be able to send money back home to help their families.

Far too often, Ribhu says, the children simply end up locked away behind padlocks only to work 17-,18-, even 19-hour days with no one to help them. Ribhu says holiday decorations similar to those discovered in the recent raid can be found on eBay and in other marketplaces online or in stores.

In addition, she says, the items are often sold off into a sophisticated network of suppliers that make it nearly impossible for retailers or consumers to know whether the goods they are purchasing have been made by child labor.

Ribhu warns, however, there are some tell-tale warning signs American consumers can be on the lookout for if they wish to avoid purchasing products made with child labor. First, she says, if the holiday decorations you are purchasing are not labeled with the country they are made in you might want to be concerned. Next, she says if they have an unusually low price and are marked as “hand made” it is another red flag.

Ribhu also warns to be cautious when examining “hand made” items that are also marked as being made in India.

While child labor was largely outlawed in the United States following the industrial revolution more than 100 years ago, Brown told ABC News and Yahoo! News that India has yet to ban child labor itself. He says currently, the country only has a ban on hazardous working conditions, but he wants to pressure the government to immediately take action to protect children there.