Nursery World - Child poverty set to increase as jobs go

A fifth of seven-year-olds in the UK live in severe poverty with both parents combined earning less than half the national average, according to new research.

The latest report published by the Millenium Cohort Study (MCS), which tracks the long-term health, education and wellbeing of almost 14,000 children born in the UK between 2000 and 2002, found that the rate of child poverty was highest among children from Pakistani and Bangladeshi families, where 73 per cent of seven-year-olds were in families living on less than 60 per cent of the average household income.

Researchers from the Institute of Education, which is conducting the MCS, interviewed parents of the children taking part in the study and asked them to place themselves in one of 18 categories corresponding to their weekly family income.

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