Child Poverty in Wales: Exploring the Challenges for Schooling Future Generations

This book provides national governments and school-communities with a model way of working to push back against child poverty, showcasing Wales’s social democracy as different from the UK conservative neoliberal project that has wreaked havoc in its four different jurisdictions. This edited book is about child poverty in Wales, specifically in a local school-community that identified its causes and effects, the challenges it poses for schooling future generations, and a series of local solutions that personify Wales’s devolved governments’ social democratic social imaginary. These responses all markedly contrast those of conservative UK Westminster governments espousing neoliberal logics for a global economy in consecutive prime ministers’ hallmark policies – Thatcher’s de-industrialisation, Cameron’s austerity, Johnson’s Brexit and Global Britain agenda, Truss’s Net Zero agenda, and Sunak’s new economic agenda in an effort to reunite the Conservative Party and win back public as well as business confidence. These policy agendas are invariably policy failures that play out for children and young people in their lived experiences of poverty and inequalities, and that find expression in social emergencies and humanitarian disasters apropos the cost of living crises, for example, as documented in this volume.