Brown to trial child development grants

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Parents of children under five will receive one-off payments of Pfund200 as part of a package of measures being unveiled today by Gordon Brown in a speech on social mobility and child poverty. In a pitch to Labour's core voters, the prime minister will say that unleashing a new wave of social mobility is the government's "driving ambition". Brown will describe how he was "a child of the first great wave of postwar social mobility" and say that this era ended in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving a "lost generation" of "Thatcher's children" who failed to benefit from this progress. He will use a speech to the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, which manages the government's specialist schools programme, to explain how the government aims to restore the kind of social mobility that his generation enjoyed. "Social mobility starts with the parents wanting their children to do better than they did themselves. "But it cannot be achieved without people themselves adopting the work ethic, the learning ethic, and aiming high, so it also depends on the government giving people the capacity to participate fully in shaping their future," he will say. Brown and his ministers have already unveiled measures drawn from Pfund125m set aside in the budget over the next three years to address child poverty. The measures include: A Pfund200 child development grant to help families that are failing to take up services offered by the Sure Start scheme, such as health jabs, help with children's reading and parenting. The Pfund13m child development grant programme will be available only to parents of children under five.