How we can build better future for our children

IN Paul Lindley’s pocket is a notebook that he carries with him everywhere.

The book is full of ideas that the founder and former chief executive of organic baby food company Ella’s Kitchen jots down as he goes.

But inside the notebook is also a poignant reminder which goes to the heart of his mission to improve the lives of children and young people: the marriage certificate of his great-great grandparents, which they signed with an “X”.

There is stark comparison between the couple, who were labourers and never taught to read or write, and Mr Lindley himself.

In 2019 he was awarded an OBE for his work at Ella’s Kitchen, which he started in 2006 at his then home in Rotherfield Greys and named after his daughter.

It is now the biggest baby food brand in the UK with sales of around
£100 million.

He previously worked for Nickelodeon, the children’s TV channel, for 10 years, and until recently was chairman of the Child Obesity Task Force in London under Mayor Sadiq Khan.

He is the current chancellor of the University of Reading.

Speaking about that marriage certificate, he says: “I think the way my little mind works is that I can’t do anything about the four generations backwards but I can do something about four people sideways from me.

“I can help them read or write, or I can help them have better mental health, or I can help them play or have cleaner air and all the rest of it. That’s what drives me.”

Mr Lindley, 57, who is married to Alison with two children, Ella, now 24, amd Patrick, 21, and lives near Henley, has published a new book about how to build a better future for children in the UK using his experience and contacts made over the past 30 years.

Raising the Nation comprises essays from more than 40 contributors about the current problems facing children and how to tackle them.

The contributors include Helle Thorning-Schmidt, former prime minister of Denmark and former chief executive of Save the Children International, David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University, and singer Charlotte Church, who has founded a school in Wales for children who struggle with mainstream
education.

Other writers include young people who have lived through the care system, headteachers, lawyers, play therapists, campaigners, academics, entrepreneurs and campaigners.

The essays cover issues such as health, education, democracy, play, local spaces and digital and are woven together with Mr Lindley’s own ideas and commentary.

He says: “I wrote Raising the Nation to challenge what success looks like for a society and to try to create a conversation or to explore what we can do to create a better future for our children.

“My answer, I suppose, is big public policy ideas that can help children to thrive and are specifically designed to help all children become the people that they’ve got the potential to be. And if they do, then we all win.

“I know that far too many don’t. At the moment, through no fault of their own, they don’t feel significant. They don’t feel confident and so don’t become the person that they’ve got the potential to be.”

Mr Lindley says that “something has gone terribly wrong with childhood”, citing statistics which show that, over his lifetime, the number of children in relative poverty in the UK has doubled to three in 10 while the country’s GDP after inflation has doubled.

He started work on the book during the covid pandemic.

He says: “The impacts of lockdown were most acute on children and their daily lives. They couldn’t do anything. They couldn’t play, they couldn’t go to school, they couldn’t see friends and they couldn’t see their grandparents.

“And yet they were the people least likely to be seriously ill from the pandemic.”

He spent two years on research, finding examples from other countries with programmes and services to help people thrive and examples from the UK of local government, businesses or charities that are making a positive difference to children’s wellbeing.

Of all the essays in the book, he found the one written by a 16-year-old girl in the care system to be the most emotive.

Mr Lindley says: “She’s now 18 and a young woman but she was in the care system then. She had been for well over a decade and over that time nobody had ever hugged her.

“She says the reason why nobody would sign off that an adult could be close enough to her was the safeguarding angles which would override every time, whether there was a danger or not, a decision as to who she could socialise with.

“So after school every other child went to another child’s home for tea but she was never allowed to do that. No one signed off on it.”

Some proposals to tackle the issues are controversial, such as Dr Runciman’s proposal to give children the right to vote.

Others are simple and have been proved to be effective, such as a campaign called Turn On The Subtitles, which aims to turn on subtitles for children’s TV programming by default.

The subtitles can be turned off by parents who do not want to see them but the campaigners cite evidence that this simple switch demonstrably increases literacy at no cost.

Mr Lindley calls the changes needed to boost children’s mental and physical wellbeing, and prospects for the future, a “spider’s web” which encompasses all areas of their lives in a joined-up manner.

He wants a radical new solution, what he calls a National Children’s Service.

“I think we’re at a consequential time in our society,” says Mr Lindley. “We’re coming out of all of these crises and things aren’t working.

“Previously when things haven’t worked for society, we’ve come up with big ideas new ideas. We’ve had the National Health Service, we’ve had pensions for older people, the welfare state, all of these things.

“I don’t see anything that we’ve had helps children deal with the things that are fundamentally different for this childhood that perhaps their parents don’t fully understand. Certainly I don’t think government understands that.

“So the idea that I have come up with, the National Children’s Service is transformational.”

He hopes the book will kick start a debate about childhood and how to build a better future for everyone.

Mr Lindley says: “I’m not saying it’s exactly we should do. I’d like people to offer other ideas and for us together to get somewhere that is better than right now.

“It will require money. If we really want to have world class childcare or a world class mental health service for children or a world class Sure Start programme again, those sort of things, we can.

“I’ve got ideas of how we would pay for that but I just want people to start talking about it.

“If we just stop for a second, press pause, and think about what’s important for our country and our society? How do we want our children to grow up?

“Or, if we don’t have children, how do we want to be looked after or to get about in 30 years’ time when the children of today will be the people who are leading or operating our society? Have we got any ideas of what we might do?

“Yes, there’s a whole load of ideas in there. Digest them, think about them, add to them start this conversation.”

• Raising the Nation (£14.99) is published by Bristol University Press and is available from the Bell Bookshop in Henley.