Britain ranked bottom for childhood quality of life

Britain has been ranked at last for childhood quality of life among 21 industrialised nations, according to a report by Unicef.

The report called Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries, looked at 40 indicators to gauge the lives of 21 children economically advanced nations.

The first study of its kind found Britain lagged behind on key measures such as poverty and deprivation, health & safety, relationships, risk-taking and young people's own sense of well-being.

Unicef UK Executive Director, David Bull said: "All countries have weaknesses that need to be addressed and no country features in the top third of its ranking of all six dimensions."

The study found there was no consistent relationship between a country's wealth, as measured in gross domestic product per capita, and a child's quality of life.

The report shows the richest countries in the world are conversely some of the poorest when it comes to the treatment of children.

Both Britain and the US found themselves in the bottom third of the league table for five or six areas of child welfare.

Professor Jonathan Bradshaw, of the department of social policy and social work at the University of York, one of the report's authors, said: "Britain has experienced two decades of very rapid increases in inequality and poverty that it is only just beginning to turn around and those instances of wellbeing are the consequence of neglect of children over that long period.

"I hope that people will take notice of this. There are lessons for government, local authorities and schools from this report; there are lessons for parents; but there are also lessons for all of us about the way we treat children.

"We don't behave terribly well to children in our society. We tend to treat them as a nuisance, as antisocial. We try to control them and we imprison them in large numbers.

"It is important that children's wellbeing is dealt with now because it is not good. Goodness knows what kind of adults they will become."

UK Director of Save the Children, Collette Marshall said the UK are failing to give children the best possible start in life and drastic action must be taken.

Child poverty remained above the 15% mark in the UK, United States, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy. But the US and the UK moved from the bottom of the table into the top 10 for family affluence, indicating a bigger gap between the richest and the poorest in society. (CD)