This book ends by underlining why histories of children’s experiences of welfare matter. The Introduction suggested that evidence from children’s lives helps us to write rigorous, truthful and multi-vocal histories of welfare in modern Britain. In this postscript we propose that these histories also offer insights to those who have the power to shape the welfare of children today.

Historians usually miss this postscript out. Complexity, diversity, contingency and contextual specificity are essential to historical practice.¹ As a result, historians are more comfortable suggesting the critical value of ‘thinking with history’ than they are in offering a categorical pre-packaged ‘answer’ to contemporary dilemmas.² Important initiatives have sought to bridge this divide between the work of academic historians and public uses of the past.³ None of the ten chapters in this book offer simple ‘lessons from history’ for the world of contemporary children’s policy. This postscript suggests, however, that new conclusions emerge when we think about the volume as a whole. We draw out five important insights that we hope speak to the work of contemporary policymakers, practitioners and, indeed, anyone seeking to invest in children’s lives today.

First, children’s actions shaped welfare in modern Britain. This book argues that we can only understand the history of children’s welfare if we listen to children themselves. This desire to engage with voice and agency is not merely a ‘mantra’ swallowed from the policymaking priorities of the last thirty years or the resulting academic norms of contemporary childhood studies.⁴ Rather, chapters in this book reveal that children’s actions and perspectives emerge from the historical evidence as critical to the provision, delivery, interpretation and impact of welfare in modern Britain.

The book suggests some of the most common ways that this happened, each revealed by evidence from several distinct times and contexts. Children made individual, and often unpredictable, decisions about how best to secure their own welfare, sometimes refusing and resisting adult investments, at other times seeking out welfare and facilitating the expansion of services. Children were articulate about what they needed, through their words as well as their actions. Some benefitted from relations with adults who had the power to amplify their experiences and views, to create public outrage and to secure institutional change. More frequently, even while superficially accepting adult investments, children selectively and privately negotiated, repurposed or subverted the resources, time or expertise available to them. Through these everyday practices, children shaped the impact of adult-authored regimes, routines and ideologies. In particular, peer cultures of collective and tactical action influenced not only a child’s own life, but also the lives of their peers. The young were providers and campaigners as well as recipients of welfare. They provided crucial unpaid labour as carers for other children, as well as promoting and fund-raising for children’s services, including for initiatives from which they benefitted. Our state children’s services, charities and, indeed, families are the shape they are today partly because of the actions of generations of young people.

Yet, popular histories of welfare in modern Britain remain dominated by a ‘top-down’ narrative focused on the progressive acts of educated, middle-class and powerful adults.⁵ This is equally true for histories of children’s welfare with its roll call of male, and less celebrated female, protagonists: Thomas Coram, Benjamin Waugh, Thomas Barnado, Margaret McMillan, Eleanor Rathbone, Myra Curtis, John Bowlby. This volume suggests that only by directing a spotlight on children’s experiences can we truly reveal the impact and significance of these investments. We suggest that these new histories of children’s welfare, told through the voices and actions of the young, also make a valuable contribution to the services that we have inherited today. Local and national government notably lack public narratives of how they have changed lives by investing in children’s welfare for centuries. Sustained silence enables popular apathy and political hostility to public investment in the welfare of the next generation.⁶ The UK state’s erasure of its own history thus becomes urgent at a time of significant reductions in public investment in children’s services and in state benefits paid to families.⁷ If we are to value state investment in the young, we need evidence – and above all powerful stories – that demonstrate to policymakers and taxpayers alike why these investments matter.⁸ In contrast to the state, some children’s charities have pioneered the inclusion of children’s experiences within their public self-narratives. Recent innovative projects include The Foundling Museum’s ‘Foundling Voices’ oral history collection, The Children’s Society’s ‘Hidden Lives Revealed’ website and the collaborative exhibition ‘On Their Own: Britain’s Child Migrants’.⁹ Yet, the near-identical online presentations of charities’ histories remain brief one-sided stories of benevolent adult intentions and changing institutional structures.¹⁰ This book has demonstrated that not only do archival sources exist to enable us to include real children’s experiences in our histories, but that these marginalized and diverse stories offer unexpected and important insights into the long-term impact of welfare. Collaboration between historians, charities, archives and museums is crucial to enable us to uncover and share these histories.

Second, despite these common ways – across time and context – that the young shaped their own welfare, children’s capacity to make change happen was subject to profound constraints. Specific historical contexts disempowered the young relative to their adult contemporaries. Chapters in this book collectively suggest a new u-shaped chronology of children’s relative agency. Far from gaining rights and prominence across the last 200 years, we suggest that children were structurally disempowered en masse in mid-twentieth-century Britain. This targeted distancing of children from power was the result of two political changes: the growth of the professional and centralized adult bureaucracy of the nation-state and introduction of the universal adult franchise for women and men from 1928. Before the Acts of 1928 and especially 1918, working-class children were no more politically disenfranchised than their mothers or many of their fathers.¹¹ As chapters in this volume suggest, nineteenth-century children and their parents alike turned to informal means beyond the ballot box to effect change. These political actions included: collective action and protest; letter writing and public petitioning; familial connections and networks of kinship; and face-to-face interactions with local authorities that had greater power and expertise in social welfare than the national state. As chapters on education, healthcare and child migration reveal, the targeted disempowerment of the young was additionally the result of the mid-twentieth-century hegemony of universal theories of child development. By constructing the child primarily as a ‘future citizen’, who was in need of distinctive and intensive socialization by adult experts, the agency and diversity of children was ignored. In this model, voices needed to be trained in childhood to become future citizens, but they did not need to be listened and responded to as already present human beings. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Children Act of 1989 were thus crucial legislative steps in recognizing the need to listen and respond to the ‘wishes and feelings of the child’.¹² The principle of attending to children’s agency was a departure from sixty years of adult practice, but it does form part of a longer tradition of children’s action on behalf of their own welfare. The ability of service providers – be they state, voluntary or community based – to acknowledge and respect the wishes and feelings of children cannot be taken for granted. It is vital that practitioners and policymakers alike recognize the need to challenge proposals that, intentionally or otherwise, marginalize or silence the views of children.

Third, in this mid-twentieth-century moment of structural disempowerment of the young, state welfare policies enhanced inequalities between children. Children who were most dependent on public investments were increasingly disadvantaged, in comparison to the private familial investments received by the majority of children. This is most shockingly revealed by children’s relatively positive accounts of institutional care in the three chapters focused on the nineteenth century, which contrast with children’s negative experiences in the two twentieth-century case studies of institutional care. Nineteenth-century institutions, financed by a combination of charitable and state funding, made larger and longer investments in the lives of poor children than their families were able to. By the mid twentieth century, the relationship had been reversed. This was partly the result of the long-term rise in living standards experienced by families that were supported by a male breadwinner’s wage, intensified by post-war economic affluence and full employment. Importantly, it was also the result of the structural under-investment by charities and especially the state in the lives of children in institutional care. This structural neglect was most extreme for older, disabled, and black and minority ethnic children who were most likely to remain in institutional care, rather than to be adopted or fostered. Public policy needs to recognize its responsibility to match – or indeed exceed – private investments in children’s lives. As the award-winning poet and care leaver Lemn Sissay has noted, it is vital that society ‘recognizes that a child in care is its greatest asset rather than treat it as its greatest threat’.¹³

Fourth, the historical and longitudinal evidence offered by these case studies offers important empirical evidence for ‘what works’ to improve children’s lives. First, the chapters suggest the transformative impact of adults who had the time, money, authority and desire to invest in a child’s welfare. Many children turned to parents, but the chapters on institutional care also underline the significance of stable, well-paid and valued staff in determining the impact of institutional care on children’s lives. Second, peer relations have consistently been significant. Children’s welfare was enhanced by opportunities to form sustained and autonomous relationships with peers, including siblings. In societal and institutional contexts of disempowerment, peers offered opportunities for tactical and collaborative solidarity that mitigated the impact of oppression. Third, agency, autonomy and privacy were integral to children’s experiences of welfare. Even if adults invested in children’s welfare, these investments were experienced as harmful if they were made without giving young people appropriate information or decision-making power. None of these insights are unexpected. Yet, they are policies and practices that we continue to fail to implement in contemporary Britain. As Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner for England 2015–21, concluded in 2020: ‘It shouldn’t require a visit from the Children’s Commissioner to remind our public services that children are humans too’.¹⁴

Finally, this book seeks to open up a dialogue with contemporary children’s policymakers and practitioners. It offers an evidence-based and critical perspective on the last 200 years of British children’s welfare that seeks to challenge some of our ‘unexamined and misleading assumptions about the present and how it came to be’.¹⁵ Above all, these histories reveal that progress in improving children’s lives requires sustained investment and conscious prioritization. The past shows that progress is never linear or inevitable. This has fundamental implications for public policymaking. As the most politically disempowered group in Britain for the last century, we propose that public authorities have a particular responsibility to focus on the impact of policymaking on children. Just as the Public Sector Equality Duty has required public authorities since 2010 to consider how their decisions affect groups with ‘protected characteristics’, it is vital that authorities prioritize how all of their policies – not merely children’s policies – affect the young.¹⁶ Children’s experiences of welfare are important, not merely because children are investments for the future, but because their lives matter now.