Steve Chalke Calls for Social Contract to Solve Child Well-Being Crisis

The founder of the Oasis Trust, the Rev Steve Chalke, has responded to the findings of a Unicef report released this week which ranked the UK at the bottom of a league table of children's well-being across 21 industrial countries.

"The findings of the Unicef report are an alarm call," said Rev Chalke. "It is time to wake up."

Rev Chalke warned, however, that the answer did not lie in "yet another round of the investment into our children and our poorest communities".

"Instead, we need to rethink our whole approach. Just doing more of what we are already doing won't change anything. We need a new social contract," he said.

Rev Chalke said church and faith-based organisations had a key role to play in turning around the UK's dire ranking in the Unicef report.

"The church, other faith organisations and the wider voluntary sector have a key role to play in rethinking the way in which we provide everything from our schools and hospitals to our GP clinics and children's and youth services.

"Though these have been regarded as core functions of the state for the last half-century, new solutions are needed if we are going to get ourselves off the bottom of Unicef's league of shame."

The Oasis Trust delivers a wide range of welfare services to vulnerable and excluded children and communities both in the UK, as well as a number of other countries around the world. Oasis is now also sponsoring five of the UK Government's new academies.

The Unicef report, titled 'Report Card 7, Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-being in Rich Countries', said that the UK lagged behind in terms of relative poverty and deprivation the quality of children's relationships with their parents and peers, child health and safety, behaviour and risk-taking and young people's own sense of wellbeing.

The UK shared the bottom third rankings for five of the six categories with the US.

Unicef said it was the first study of childhood across industrialised countries.