We’re all getting poorer. What does that look like for British children and their life chances?
If we found seven typical 5-year-olds to represent today’s UK, what would their stories reveal?
Seven Children is about injustice and hope. Danny Dorling’s highly original book constructs seven ‘average’ children from millions of statistics—each child symbolising the very middle of a parental income bracket, from the poorest to the wealthiest.
Dorling’s seven were born in 2018, when the UK faced its worst inequality since the Great Depression and became Europe’s most socially divided nation.
They turned five in 2023, amid a devastating cost-of-living crisis. Their country has Europe’s fastest-rising child poverty rates, and even the best-off of the seven is disadvantaged. Yet aspirations endure.
Immersive, surprising and thought-provoking
Seven Children gets to the heart of post-pandemic Britain’s most pressing issues.
What do we miss when we focus only on the super-rich and the most deprived? What kinds of lives are British children living between the extremes? Why are most British parents on below-average income? Who are today’s real middle class?
And how can we reverse the trends that are leaving all children worse off than their parents?
Meet the children …
Endorsements
"No-one plucks the heart strings like Danny Dorling, but he does it with devastating facts and graphs. This searing book spells out British children’s lives, divided by the deepest inequality since the 1930s. Read it and pass it to anyone who doesn’t know how we live now."
"We need both statistics and stories to make the case for change. This is a rich and engaging portrait of children’s life chances in contemporary Britain."
"Dorling could have just left us with the devastating stats on British inequality. But his brilliant journey through seven imaginary young lives shows exactly how—and why—children face an unfair future."
"A must-read for anyone concerned about Britain’s future. With poignancy and creativity, Dorling shows us the average child’s reality, and challenges us to create a more-than-average future. An engaging, robust book that should be on the Prime Minister’s desk."
"Compelling. Fleshing out what inequality means for families across the income spectrum, Seven Children settles a highly topical question: we should focus on poverty and inequality."
"A brilliantly sharp, angry and informed account of all that has gone wrong with British childhood. Dorling’s compelling statistics and details of daily life should shock and shame a nation into action."
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Supporting notes
Open or CloseNote on the book cover:
Although the book concerns seven children, there are eight bars on its cover. The first seven bars are roughly proportional to the annual incomes of the families of seven typical children in the UK in 2018. The eighth bar, the on furthest to the right, is the highest, but is truncated as it extends. That bar should go far higher. It represents the children of the 1% best-off parents in the UK. This book is not about them; but their shadow hangs over the lives of all the other children in the countries that make up the UK, because their parents have so much money and power.”
Note on the home page text:
The claim on the back page of this book that ‘We’re all getting poorer’ could be disputed. A clear time frame is not given.
The claim is made based on the March 2024 release of the ‘Households Below Average Income’ data, which can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/households-below-average-income-for-financial-years-ending-1995-to-2023
One of the 29 data files in that release has this title:
population-trends-hbai-1994-95-2022-23-tables.ods
Within the data file, a spreadsheet, the final table (3.4tr) is titled ‘Table 3.4tr: Number of individuals falling below various thresholds of 2010/11 median income held constant in real terms, United Kingdom’.
The final line of that final table provides the official data on the very latest changes in the 12 months between the financial years of 2021/22 and 2022/23. It will not be updated by UK government officials until March 2025.
To begin, for all the groups measured in ways used to measure how poor a group is, poverty among that group has risen most recently. The largest rise – measured within just the one most recent year – has been of 700,000 more people in the UK living below 70% of the median household income that had been calculated some twelve years earlier, taking that number to 14.3 million people before housing costs. These are people living now on much less than the average family had to live on in the UK in 2010/11. However, in percentage terms this was just as large a rise as the increase in 600,000 people living below 60% of the median income calculated after households costs, which rose to 12.0 million people by the financial year 2022/23.
Alternatively, should you need more convincing, the penultimate table can be consulted: ‘Table 3.3tr: Number of individuals falling below various thresholds of contemporary median income, United Kingdom’. This shows that in the case of four of the five highest proportions ever measured in the UK, the highest proportions of people living under 50% of contemporary median income occurred in the most recent five years as compared to the whole period measured from 1994 to 2023.
However, you may quibble that the suggestion that poverty is rising is not about all of us. In that case, we could look instead at another of the 29 files: ‘summary-hbai-1994-95-2022-23-tables.ods’ and note that incomes in 2022-2023 were lower for every single ‘quintile group’ of households as compared to a recent year in the past, whether calculated before or after housing costs. For example, the best-off fifth of people received £1236 a week in 2019/20 as compared to £1227 most recently measured by government (the year ending March 2023). All these numbers are adjusted to take inflation into account. This affluent group are, of course, only very slightly poorer now, on average, than they were, but they are still ‘poorer’ even if they are not at all ‘poor’. Every group got poorer.
Within a social group there will always be individuals that become better off, even at the very worst of times, but there was no group, no household type, no people living in any region of England, no quintile income group, no family setup – in which people of that type, as a whole, did not get poorer or at least see no improvement at all in the five years leading up to March 2023, and almost certainly in 2024 and possibly beyond. Given that the survey is not huge, you might have expected a small improvement to be shown for one group measured, by pure chance, due to sampling error. The worsening of all of our living conditions in the UK has been such that this has not occurred. If anything, sample error may meant that a few groups appear to have become only slightly poorer. People without children have also been affected. But the situation for families with children has worsened the most, as they have the most mouths to feed and food prices have risen greatly in recent years. The affluent cut back on expenditures; whereas the poor, in increasing numbers, begin to go hungry.
