Health, housing and education: tackling multiple disadvantage

Paradoxically, at the same time as governments have tried to apply similar sets of policy solutions (eg quasi-markets, target-setting, etc) across a whole range of social policy fields, they have also sought to downplay the relationship between those fields. Thus, in recent years, it has been fashionable to treat the solution to educational problems as largely to be found within the educational arena. As Mortimore and Whitty indicate in this volume, this has often produced an over-inflated notion of what school-centred initiatives can achieve. At its most extreme, the argument that poverty should not be used as an excuse for underachievement has been taken to mean that poverty is not an explanation for underachievement. This chapter seeks to demonstrate the intimate connections between education and other fields of social policy in creating social exclusion and argues for the forging of similar links in developing means of combating it.