C4EO - cross cutting review: poverty

C4EO will conduct a cross-cutting theme review on child poverty in the spring of 2009. It will be led by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER).

What is child poverty?

‘Child poverty’ is primarily defined in terms of income. For the purpose of the targets set out above, it is measured through the number of children living in households below 60 per cent of contemporary median equivalised household income. This is known as the relative low income indicator, which looks at whether the poorest families are keeping pace with the growth of incomes in the economy as a whole.

A child is understood as being an individual aged under 16, or an unmarried 16 to 18 year old in full-time education.

In a consultation exercise carried out in 2002-03, Measuring Child Poverty set out a new tiered approach to measuring child poverty in the UK over the long-term. This encompasses the relative low income indicator used to determine progress against the target to eradicate child poverty, together with two associated indicators used by the Government for monitoring purposes:

1. absolute low income: this indicator measures whether the poorest families are seeing their income rise in real terms. The level is fixed as equal to the relative low-income threshold for the baseline year of 1998-99 expressed in today’s prices; and
2. material deprivation and low income combined: this indicator provides a wider measure of people’s living standards. This indicator measures the number of children living in households that are both materially deprived (i.e. lacking certain goods and services) and have an income below 70 per cent of contemporary median equivalised household income.

For more information see the Background paper on the child poverty cross-cutting theme (110kb PDF file).