Child development grants trial

Parents in some of England's most deprived communities are to be given £200 grants in return for taking part in programmes to improve the health, well-being and social development of their children.

The £13 million Child Development Grant scheme will be unveiled by the Prime Minister as part of what he will identify as "the great test of our time - to build a fairer, more prosperous and upwardly mobile Britain".

Ten pilot projects in low-income neighbourhoods will trial the one-off grants as part of a £125 million three-year drive announced in the Budget to find innovative solutions to child poverty.

Based on schemes in the US, where parents are rewarded for things like making sure their children attend health check-ups and receive immunisation jabs, the grants are targeted at the most hard-to-reach parents who currently do not take up services offered by children's centres.

The pilots will test whether offering cash incentives can encourage socially-excluded parents to participate in agreed programmes of action to improve their children's well-being.

Speaking to the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust in London, Mr Brown will say the project forms part of his ambition "to see a Britain that is upwardly mobile once again".

Mr Brown will say that post-war gains in social mobility - from which he benefited personally - stalled in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving a "lost generation" of "Thatcher's children" who were unable to progress and improve their lot in life.

Since 1997, Labour has narrowed the achievement gap between social classes in primary and secondary schools to create a platform for "a new era of social mobility", he will say.

But he will admit that Britain remains a country of substantial class inequalities, where the best predictor for a child's future exam results, health, life expectancy and housing is still the family he or she is born into.

"The highest priority for us now as a country is that - building on our improved educational performance - we make the right decisions to accelerate social mobility in the years ahead," Mr Brown is expected to say.