Since 2020, the UK has seen a steady rise in poverty among children.
By 2023-24, 4.5m children (or 31%) were in relative poverty, meaning their household’s income was below 60% of the national average after housing costs, up from 3.9m in 2020-21.
There is also a well-established link between family poverty and contact with children's services. This was reflected in a recent Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) research, which found rising poverty and homelessness were driving demand for children’s social care.
Similarly, a third of children's practitioners who responded to a 2024 Social Workers Union (SWU) survey had seen children removed from their family where financial hardship or poverty was a key contributing factor.
A fear of stigmatising poorer people
Yet despite the profession’s history of helping those in financial hardship, social workers now report struggling to incorporate poverty awareness into their practice.
A 2025 Community Care poll of 468 practitioners revealed that 62% believed poverty was not taken into account during assessments and planning.
Professor Anna Gupta, who has spent over a decade researching and advocating for poverty-aware practice, attributes this in part to a fear of stigmatising destitute people.
“It's always been hard to talk about poverty and child protection," she says. "Many feel that it’s stigmatising the poor, which we're not."
“What we're saying is that poverty makes life much harder. It's not about individual fecklessness or laziness. It's hard to bring up your children when you're living in temporary or substandard accommodation, or have little money and three jobs.”
The political discourse around poverty
She has linked the profession's recent struggles with poverty-aware practice to a rising political narrative framing poverty as an “individual failure”, rather than a consequence of social injustice.
Gupta traces this to the 2010s, when coalition and Conservative governments made significant cuts to welfare spending, including by introducing the two-child benefit cap, which prevents parents claiming universal credit for more than two children.
Similar thinking went on to affect social work policy. Gupta cites a 2013 speech on reforming social work education by then education secretary Michael Gove as a prime example.
"In too many cases, social work training involves idealistic students being told that the individuals with whom they will work have been disempowered by society," said Gove.
"They will be encouraged to see these individuals as victims of social injustice whose fate is overwhelmingly decreed by the economic forces and inherent inequalities which scar our society...[This analysis] robs individuals of the power of agency and breaks the link between an individual’s actions and the consequences."
Under this narrative, social workers were deemed to be excusing 'bad parenting' under the guise of poverty.
‘Social work is part of the state’
“Unfortunately, social work is part of the state," says Gupta. "And when the state shrinks under ideas around neoliberalism and austerity, it becomes more narrowly individually-focused."
This has been compounded by a child protection system that is often reactive, risk-averse and shaped by inquiries into child deaths that have fostered a culture of blame, she says.
“After Covid, I hoped there would be much more awareness that poverty is a social harm. But there’s still this narrative that it is an individual failure.”
Without a shift in approach, Gupta warns, the profession risks failing those it seeks to support. As more low-income families come into contact with social services, poverty must be placed at the centre of how practitioners assess and support them, she stresses.
‘Poverty is much more than a lack of money'
This starts with re-examining the complex experience of living in poverty. What does it mean to be destitute?
“Poverty is material but also involves a lack of social capital and opportunities, like adequate housing or education," says Gupta.
“There’s shame and stigmatisation that comes with it. It's much more than a lack of money. It’s about understanding multiple levels of marginalisation.”
Understanding the lived experience of poverty
Social workers need to ground their approach in families’ lived experiences of poverty. This is particularly crucial during assessments, where overlooking poverty risks misjudging the context surrounding the familial issues practitioners are called to address.
“[Social workers should] explore how it links to other family problems - mental health, depression, learning disabilities, substance misuse, and even domestic abuse," she adds. "It is a stressor that interacts with these problems.”
For Gupta, surface-level, tick-box assessments won’t suffice. Instead, social workers need to carry out a full exploration of the child’s life within their family, housing and community.
“What’s life like for this child in this family? What is it like for the mother managing on a low income, taking the children to school, and managing school holidays?
“[Social workers] need to look at how stress and neighbourhood factors impact family life, and what can be done to help.”
Pockets of good practice
While this should be standard practice, Gupta’s interactions with parents have shown her that it isn’t in many areas. Though she acknowledges that a relationship-based, hands-on approach is challenging amid today’s overstretched services.
“I think there are pockets of it, but it’s not across the board,” she says.
“I've been involved in parent groups (through research studies and parental advocacy groups), and certainly from my discussions with them, it doesn't feel as if much has changed.”
Anti-poverty commitments
Some councils have committed to incorporating poverty into social work practice.
In 2023, the Sussex Family Justice Board, which includes West Sussex, East Sussex, and Brighton and Hove councils, issued a family court anti-poverty practice statement, drawn up by social workers and lawyers in the area.
It set out a number of practice principles, including that family court practitioners:
- Remember that poverty is a national problem and not an individual failing.
- Recognise and challenge the stigma of poverty, avoiding assumptions that families can’t manage finances or are making bad choices.
- Be aware that poverty can impact on emotional and psychological wellbeing, creating shame and affecting self-worth and identity.
- Use inclusive non-shaming language to ask how people are managing financially.
- Increase their knowledge of the benefits system and work with other agencies to maximise families' incomes.
The statement was also adopted by Brighton and Hove Safeguarding Children Partnership, while Brighton and Hove Council already had in place an anti-poverty community of practice, set up during Covid.
One of its members, lead practitioner Susan Pierce, a co-author of the statement, says its work has included developing a cost of living factsheet, to support families, and a cost of living checklist to help social workers identify and address families’ financial needs.
The team has also provided additional training on using benefit calculators, so practitioners can help families understand what they are entitled to.
This was noted in Brighton and Hove children's services last full inspection, in March 2024, for which it was rated outstanding. In it, Ofsted praised senior managers for ensuring poverty-aware practice was "embedded throughout children's social care".
Resource constraints
However, while the anti-poverty practice statement included a commitment to also "provide and seek training for practitioners on poverty", in Brighton and Hove this has been delayed due to resource constraints.
“We’ve developed the training, and the next step is to implement it,” says Pierce.
“The difficulty is we’ve created this community of practice without any additional time or staffing available for it.”
Despite that, Pierce says she and colleagues will be delivering a poverty webinar in September, which will be recorded and circulated across the council.
The session will cover how government and systemic issues keep people in poverty, pre-conceived ideas about poverty, how to start a conversation with families about it, how it differs to neglect, and tools and services practitioners can refer to for assistance.
Providing practical help
When faced with limited resources, Gupta advises practitioners to focus on providing practical help, drawing on local charities and community groups.
That might mean arranging school holiday activities so parents can work, or something as simple as helping them get a washing machine.
“A washing machine can make a huge difference if it’s broken and you’ve got three kids,” she says.
There is also value in offering financial advice, starting with entitlement to benefits, including by linking families to Citizens Advice or other sources of welfare guidance.
Again, Gupta maintains that there are pockets of such practice throughout the country, but that these are not widespread.
Offering parents a choice
When social workers offer support, Gupta stresses the importance of providing families with a choice.
She recalls visiting a woman living in deep poverty and taking note of a new sofa, which a social worker had arranged for a charity to provide. Gupta was surprised to find the woman conflicted about her new living room addition.
“She was grateful and pleased. But she said, ‘It was given to me’.”
It was a lesson in the psychological value of being given a choice. When you live in poverty, so much of your life is shaped by limitations. Even small decisions can carry meaning.
“It may be that [the woman] could have asked, or the social worker could have gone to pick it up with her. It might be that there isn’t much choice, but having a conversation helps.”
A no-judgment approach
Supporting families living in poverty also means stepping through the door with a no-judgment mindset, warns Gupta.
“If a family has to use food banks, [you need to] acknowledge this isn’t necessarily their fault," she says.
“Make sure you’ve done everything possible to address the difficult context of the family’s life — that you treat people with respect, without compounding the othering and discriminatory processes [they may already be facing].”
Being a proactive advocate
One of Gupta’s students once described a troubling experience at a homeless person’s unit, where staff treated the man she was supporting with what she described as “appalling” disrespect.
Though still a student, she was able to advocate for him. But the incident left her wondering - would it have been worse if he did not have a trainee professional bearing witness?
People experiencing poverty are often denied the attention and respect others receive without question, a dynamic that takes a deep psychological toll, says Gupta.
So, she believes, social workers should always act as proactive advocates. This may mean accompanying parents to appointments.
Ultimately, it’s about recognising the ‘symbolic capital’ social workers carry.
“They’re seen as a person of greater value, their voice gets listened to more,” Gupta explains.
“Some may say that creates dependency, and they should be empowered to do it themselves. But it’s important to acknowledge these difficulties that people are going through and that they need support in that process.”
‘To support the parent is to support the child’
However, no matter the support in place, for Gupta, poverty will never be meaningfully addressed within social work so long as the child is viewed in isolation from their family context.
She tells me of previous research where parents recalled practitioners refusing to help them, claiming they were ‘the child’s social worker’.
This tunnel vision decontextualised the child, making it harder to understand the full pressures the family was under, says Gupta. In many cases, it could be why poverty is not considered an issue to be addressed, but becomes a note in the child’s file.
“To support the parent is to support the child," she says. "Obviously, don't lose focus on children at risk of abuse and neglect, but also try to understand what the underlying factors are. How can that be prevented?”
Impact of government policy
Gupta's comments come with the current government rolling out reforms to children's social care based in part on this philosophy.
Under the Families First Partnership programme, families with multiple and complex needs will be allocated family help lead practitioners to provide direct help and co-ordinate support for them from other practitioners and agencies.
These practitioners should "have a focus on the whole family, recognising this is often the best way of improving outcomes for children and young people", according to the Department for Education's guide to the programme.
The guide also says that practitioners should be able to understand the impact of poverty and be "skilled at recognising the distinction between poverty and neglect and responding accordingly".
The reforms are backed by annual funding of £523m from 2025-29, but at this early stage it is hard to predict how far they will shift practice in a more poverty-aware direction.
At the same time, the government is drawing up its child poverty strategy, due for publication this autumn. This is designed to help increase incomes, reduce the cost of essentials, increase family resilience and improve support, particularly for children in the early years.
Children's charities and think tanks are adamant that the strategy must include the abolition of the two-child benefit cap if it is going to have any chance of reversing the tide of rising child poverty. But though the government is considering this, there are doubts over whether it it will implement the policy.
Going the extra mile
Amid this political uncertainty, and rising child poverty, how much can practitioners realistically achieve on their own, in a system constrained by limited funding and shaped by a risk-averse, target-driven culture?
Yet, social work history has shown that change can start at the front line. And Gupta’s years of research have proven that the true value of social work extends far beyond bureaucratic metrics.
“I understand [practitioners] aren’t often valued for the work they do by the institutions," she says. "But I’ve seen through my research that it’s incredibly valuable for the families when social workers go the extra mile and show that they care.”
