Teenager Alyssa Cole from Toxteth speaks out about the impact of poverty in a new podcast series about children in the North
10:46, 14 Jan 2025Updated 10:48, 14 Jan 2025
Alyssa Cole, 16, has spoken to the Northern Agenda’s Our Kids In The North podcast
Alyssa Cole is clearly very proud to come from Toxteth, but describes the “love-hate relationship” she and others have with the city where she’s grown up. A student at Liverpool’s Archbishop Blanch School, as well as a high ranking sea cadet and an accomplished paddle boarder, the 16-year-old is hoping to get on a law course at university and then go into the Navy.
But it’s hard to escape the fact that in Toxteth, like many communities across Northern England, a lot of families are struggling with the impact of poverty that will hold back their life chances. Talking about the area on the Northern Agenda’s Our Kids In The North podcast, Alyssa says: “The sense of community, I can’t actually fault it, everyone is so kind to each other there and we all try to come together and help with what we can.
“But I think it’s one of the most underfunded areas. A lot of my friends from Toxteth will struggle with mental health more because they’re worrying about where they’re going to get the money for courses with, say, cadets or courses with school trips.
Listen to the first episode of the podcast at the link below:
“And even when the parents are saying don’t worry about it they’re still worrying because they’re trying not to make it hard on the parents because they feel that sense of guilt. And they feel like there’s no way to come out of it, there’s no way to actually be normal kids. There’s no way to actually not mature faster than richer people, upper class people, they have to mature on a lot faster scale.”
Alyssa is a member of the University of Liverpool’s Young Persons Advisory Group, which puts researchers in touch with young people to make sure their work is child-friendly. She’s also contributed to Child of the North, a new series of reports setting out the many challenges facing young people in a region with an under-18 population of some 3.3 million.
On Our Kids In The North, journalists Rob Parsons and Anne Gouk will be exploring topics like the state of Northern schools, the early years of children in our region, why there are so many young people in care in the North and the options available to pupils after they leave school.
There are 3.3 million people under the age of 18 in Northern England – and the podcast speaks to articulate young people from places like Liverpool, Newcastle and Blackpool as well as the experts and political leaders who’ve made it their mission to improve their lives.
Our Kids In The North is a new podcast from The Northern Agenda
It’s hard to talk about any aspect of growing up in Northern England without mentioning child poverty, as it’s the underlying cause linked to so many social problems including poor school performance, joblessness and ill health.
There are more than a million kids living in poverty in the North – the equivalent to one in every three children. In the South East and South West of England, the figure is closer to one in four.
Of the top 10 local authorities in England with the highest rates, six are in the North West. And there are 49 wards across the North where more than half of children are living in poverty, including one in Middlesbrough where nearly three quarters of kids are living below the breadline.
And as the graphic below shows, many more children in the North than 30 years ago are now living in poverty despite having at least one parent in work.
This poverty doesn’t always manifest itself in the ways you’d expect. Children in poorer areas are more likely to have tooth decay – and last year in Liverpool Keir Starmer spoke of his shock that the biggest cause of children going into Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust hospital was to have rotting teeth extracted.
David Taylor-Robinson, a public health consultant at Alder Hey but also a professor at the University of Liverpool, has another shocking local story about how poverty is having a direct impact on health. He tells how a child came into the hospital after being diagnosed with diabetes, with medics then needing to titrate their insulin (work out the correct dosage) against their food intake.
He said: “And it became clear that there were a number of brothers and sisters there, this kid had a number of siblings. And they were all hungry. The whole family was hungry. And they asked whether or not the other kids could be fed.
“And it wasn’t hospital policy to provide food for siblings in the hospital. And as it turns out, this child was given the insulin and then given the meal which was titrated against the insulin.
Park Road, Liverpool 8(Image: Colin Lane/Liverpool Echo)
“The meal got shared with all of the siblings because they were hungry and the child had a hypoglycemic episode, a very dangerous drop in blood sugar. Because the kid in question hadn’t eaten enough food because the food had been shared across the family.
“And one of the nurses came to the health inequalities board in the hospital and presented this story. And it’s actually led to a whole range of things that the hospital are now trying to do to tackle child poverty.
“But in a microcosm, it’s an example of how failing to address the root causes of poor health and poverty lead to huge costs to services because that child needed to be admitted for over a week because of this episode, at huge cost.”
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As well as seeing the impact of poverty at family level, Professor Taylor-Robinson takes a wider view of the issue as he leads Liverpool’s Health Inequalities Policy Research Group. He is able to compare how our country and our region is doing in comparison with other parts of the world – and the results aren’t good.
He said: “If people aren’t into this, then they should be. I can’t think of any more important moral imperative or political topic at the moment. And it’s completely aligned with all of the things that the Government are trying to do.
“We do a lot of work looking at data in different countries. And it’s clear that if you take a step back and look at child health on average in England, we do poorly. We’re about 27th in the ranking of rich countries across multiple domains of children’s health. We’re falling down the rankings. We like to think of ourselves as a world-leading society. And I think children’s health is one of the best measures of how a society is doing.”
Professor David Taylor-Robinson
He adds: “I work a lot in Scandinavia, in Denmark. If you present this stuff in Scandinavia and Denmark, people say, ‘wow, do you not care about children in the UK?’ And they find it truly shocking’.
Mark Mon-Williams, an academic at the University of Leeds and part of the N8 Research Partnership of research intensive universities, has edited the Child of the North Report series looking into subjects like school absence, infant mortality, obesity and the impact of the pandemic.
“We’re producing these reports on a monthly basis, and every report that comes off shocks me and it upsets me,” he says. “In every report, it’s got an infographic which just highlights the issues that are affecting millions of young people throughout the UK.
“And when you see that infographic, you’re just speechless. I mean, you literally want to cry. We’ve almost become normalised to the millions of our children who are going to school hungry or suffering from mental ill health or being subjected to the terrible repercussions of poverty. This is within a very healthy country in the year 2024.”
It’s clear these inequalities are crippling the nation’s economy and as well as holding back the lives of millions of people. But how did we get here?
“We took our eye off the ball,” he says. “If you want a healthy country, you’ve got to look at the next generation. It’s so obvious. It’s amazing that we neglected this. So we really failed to invest in our children, young people over a long period. And what that means is we’re now paying the price for neglecting the UK’s future.
“We’ve also failed repeatedly to address the fundamental problems in the way that we organise our public services around children and young people. So we just haven’t listened to the evidence because the evidence is very clear that we’ve got to connect and coordinate health, education, social care, and policing because otherwise families, particularly disadvantaged areas, fall through those cracks.
“So we really got to start looking at creating public services that are fit for purpose. And poverty is this massive driver that sort of sits behind all of these problems.
Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer (centre), with shadow health secretary Wes Streeting (2nd right) during a visit to Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, Liverpool, to unveil their Child Health Action Plan. Picture date: Thursday January 11, 2024.
“All we’ve got to start doing is drilling into that and starting to understand how poverty impacts upon families and children. And that then allows us to start addressing underlying problems and not waste money on chasing after symptoms rather than the disease itself.”
The Child of the North reports propose what Professor Mon-Williams describes as a “children-first” approach to government.
And it’s something he says has been embraced by the new Labour government, which made one of its five so-called missions for a better Britain breaking down the barriers to opportunity for children and young people.
“So in practice, what this means is that we can really ask our policymakers to stay focused on children and young people when they look to build a prosperous UK. For example, we need policies around housing that reflect the needs of children needing spaces to play with it if we’re going to start building a better country.
“We need transport systems that ensure that children and young people can move from areas with few jobs to areas where there are more jobs. So we can’t have a transport policy that is just thinking about adults and older adults which is what we’ve been doing for decades.”
There was a big child poverty conference in the North East recently where a video was shown which really powerfully sums up why all this matters. It’s called Potential not Poverty by the charity Save the Children UK, you can find it here on YouTube.
It shows a young girl growing up, thriving in school, getting support from her family and going to university, culminating in a moment in a hospital where a patient needs help and she dashes in, apparently having become a doctor.
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But then there’s a sliding doors moment when you realise that actually the girl hasn’t become a doctor and is actually a cleaner or a janitor. And you go backwards through an alternative version of her life to see how poverty has held her back, she’s missing meals and can’t concentrate in school and she’s not getting time to study because she has to help her parents.
It’s a heartbreaking watch and it was put together with the help of young people from the North, including Aisha Amin, a 20-year-old from Tameside in Greater Manchester. She says she wanted to show the importance of young people being able to thrive, not just survive.
Describing herself as being from a “very financially unstable” family, Aisha tells me about “substituting some of your meals for those 50 pence noodles because they are the cheapest thing you can get in a shop and bringing them to class”.
She adds: “Another part was not being able to focus very well. I was very unfocused because frankly when you’re doing school and stuff you just don’t care that much about doing maths or learning history when you have bigger things to worry about at home. You’re put in more of a mature role than you should be.”
Aisha is now studying to be an illustrator at Manchester Metropolitan University, a path she chose to give other members of her family a link to the creative industries if they want to pursue them in future. She makes a pitch to people who haven’t experienced poverty as to why they should care about the tens of thousands of young people across the North growing up without the basics.
“It’s an issue that could affect anyone at any moment,” she says. “Life isn’t secure. My family’s had good times and they’ve had bad times too. You could be at the top of your game and be in my position at another moment. But also, besides caring on a human level of ‘I want someone else to live happily and successfully’, it helps everyone in England if everyone’s thriving.
“Especially up North if there’s more opportunities like positions open to people up North, the North will thrive and there’ll be more jobs there’ll be better opportunities for most people.”