Right from the Start

Alan Sinclair, 1976

Today, 15,000 Scottish children are in the care of social services and one child in four is assessed as ‘vulnerable’ when they arrive at primary school.

Alan Sinclair, founder and former chief executive of the Wise Group, has spent 10 years studying where we are going wrong. He has set out his analysis and a long-term plan to put Scotland on a better path in a new book, Right from the Start: Investing in Parents and Babies. "There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul," said Nelson Mandela, "than the way in which it treats its children."

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon brought the message closer to home when she said: "We want Scotland to be the best place in the world to bring up children." But mind the gap. UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund, has carried out the most robust study available on child wellbeing across 29 of the world’s advanced economies. Scotland and the rest of the UK came in at a lowly 16th position – below the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Ireland.

At the top of the table are Holland, Norway, Iceland and Finland. We scored particularly badly in early childhood education and the number of young people not in work, training or education.

Returning from a visit to Utrecht and Amsterdam to see how they achieved this, I spoke to a Dutch woman who had spent the first half of her life in Holland and the second half in Scotland. Her view was straightforward: ‘In Holland we love children. In Scotland you tolerate children.’

Surely not. Yet it is a fact that more than one Scottish child in four arrives at primary school ‘vulnerable’. Vulnerable is defined as poor in one or more of social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive ability or physical health and wellbeing.

About half of the vulnerable children come from households with the lowest income. Some consequences are visible; disruptive children in school and poor attainment. Others like poor physical and mental health, offending, alcohol abuse and youth unemployment are delayed. But timing should not blind us to the source of the problem. In Scotland we have some uncomfortable truths to confront but building a nation of better parents and happier children is not an impossible task.

There is so much we can do to influence positive change. It is not by luck that Dutch children are the happiest and have the greatest wellbeing in the world. It is liberating to know that improving parenting is not about tilting at windmills.

ISBN: 9780993352775