Louise Casey’s report on troubled families has come in for a few knocks today. The ‘troubled families tsar’ interviewed 16 families to draw up a picture of the challenges that those within the 120,000-strong group that the Prime Minister identified after last summer’s rioting as in need of focused work.
Peter Mullen in the Telegraph says the research spells out ‘the blinking obvious’, which in many ways it does: the lives of the families on this list are messy beyond most people’s normal experience. Casey has simply conducted a very small-scale exercise in qualitative research and then published it.
Like many CoffeeHousers, I’m more of a quantitative data person myself. I do love a good graph, and if I’m really lucky, a whole spreadsheet of figures to chart out the progress of a government policy.
But the value of this collection of life stories is that it does show in graphic detail just how very complex each one of these ‘troubled’ families is.
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