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Getting the best start in life for people who come from a poor background has always been a difficult issue for politicians. This week a government-commissioned report identified a cycle of “dysfunction and under-achievement” – and the need to tackle it by throwing resources at vulnerable children from a very young age. But can failure to achieve in early years halt social mobility from the outset?

According to 2005 research from the London School of Economics there was an overall decline in social mobility in the UK between 1958 and 1970.

The people who moved forward during this period were from the middle classes, the researchers concluded. If your parents were well educated and have a good income, it trickled down into the next generation.

It also suggested children from poorer backgrounds did not benefit from any of the changes that were going on in society like the expansion of higher education in the 1980s.

In this week’s report, Labour MP Graham Allen says success or failure in early childhood has “profound economic consequences” and calls for more private money to be channelled into early intervention schemes to help set children on the right path in life.

He recommends regular assessments of all pre-school children, focusing on their social and emotional development.

The government, who will unveil plans to tackle “permanent social segregation” later this month, acknowledge that failure to achieve in early years can affect social mobility, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has said.

The independent National Equality Panel was set up in October 2008 and has produced several reports looking at how people from different backgrounds typically come in the distributions of earnings, income or wealth in England.

In its latest report in January 2010 about social mobility, An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK it concluded: “Moving up a ladder is harder if its rungs are further apart, and those who start higher up fight harder to ensure their children do not slip down”.

National Equality panel chairman, professor John Hills said: “It does depend on how you measure income, and its links to occupation, but the UK has less mobility than Europe.”

In terms of international comparisons, measuring social mobility by how well children do from one generation to the next, the LSE study found the UK lags behind countries like Germany Sweden, and Finland.

In the comparison of eight European and North American countries, the UK and US were at the bottom, with the lowest social mobility.

Two years ago, a major study by former cabinet minister Alan Milburn warned that social mobility had slowed – and that the most sought-after professions were increasingly dominated by young people from affluent families.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation agrees that one of the reasons for the decline in social mobility in the UK is the lack of progression in jobs and a career path for people in poverty.

Helen Barnard, poverty programme manager at the charity, says: “With low skills and and low quality jobs, there is no progression, and with manufacturing gone, it is harder to progress from a low skill area.”

The foundation says having access social networks also play an important part in this.

It is a view echoed by the Social Mobility Foundation, a charity which organises work experience for well educated students from lower income backgrounds.

David Johnston, chief executive officer, says: “We have situations where firms are quite open with us in saying that we can offer work experience or internships, but you need to be a relative of one of our clients.”

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

“Is there a doctor on board?” is perhaps one of the questions most dreaded by people in the medical profession.

Yet doctors and nurses are constantly being asked to respond in emergency situations because they are, in theory, best qualified to help.

Dealing with the aftermath of a car accident, treating a heart attack victim mid flight or helping a passerby collapsed in the street – all are seen as part of a doctor’s duty.

On 7 July 2005, a group of doctors preparing for a meeting at the headquarters of the British Medical Association in London’s Tavistock Square heard a bomb explode. The no 30 bus had been ripped apart right outside their building.

Dr Peter Holden, a GP from Matlock, took charge of the carnage created by the terrorist’s bomb. By coincidence he was also trained in immediate emergency care.

In his diary, written soon after the events of 7/7, Dr Holden recalls his feelings on that fateful morning: “I have trained for such a situation for 20 years – but on the assumption that I would be part of a rescue team, properly dressed, properly equipped, and moving with semi military precision.

“Instead, I am in shirt sleeves and a pinstripe suit, with no pen and no paper, and I am technically an uninjured victim.

“All I have is my ID card, surgical gloves, and my colleagues’ expectation that I will lead them though this crisis.”

Yet Dr Holden and his colleagues set about treating the injured and the dying.

His initial concern was to ensure that the area was safe and that the patients and doctors were safe. At any point another bomb could have gone off.

His next priority was to work out who to treat first, using a very rudimentary system of triage.

“It’s not the people shouting and screaming and making noise you go to first, it’s the quiet ones,” he says.

With no access to fluids for another 40 minutes, the doctors had to concentrate on opening airways, controlling bleeding and treating the walking wounded.

Everything had to be done quickly. Very quickly. And these acts were to prove vital that day.

Dr Holden and his colleagues couldn’t save everyone they treated in Tavistock Square on 7/7, but the GPs “instinctively understood they had to do the most for the most,” he says.

Other colleagues wanted to do a perfect ‘Rolls Royce’ job, he remembers, but in emergency medicine “it’s about making do and mending”.

As vice chairman of BASICS, British Association for Immediate Care, Dr Holden says that most doctors are not trained to deal with emergency medical events.

But the public still expects a doctor to be able to handle an unconscious patient and deliver a baby wherever and whenever it occurs.

Medical people know they can’t walk by on the other side of the road – it wouldn’t be ethical – but they also have a job to cope with the emergency they are confronted with.

Often it means improvising.

In 2001 two doctors, a professor of orthopaedic and accident surgery and a senior house officer, famously saved a woman’s life on a flight from Hong Kong to London on which they were all travelling.

The woman had a collapsed lung and the doctors created their own chest drain using a coat hanger, biro and mineral water bottle.

There are many other stories of heroic life-saving interventions – and not just by medical personnel.

In April 2007, a pregnant woman’s waters broke on a First Choice Airways plane flying to Crete from Manchester.

With the help of air stewardess Carol Miller, Alfie was born while the plane was in mid-flight, weighing only 1lb 1oz. He was three months premature.

His breathing was so poor that the resourceful and heroic Miller made use of a drinking straw to inflate his lungs. She then performed mouth-to-mouth on the baby and repeatedly massaged his heart until the diverted plane landed at Gatwick.

Would a doctor have coped in a similar situation?

Dr Vic Calland, a clinical adviser to North West Ambulance Service, also runs BASICS courses for GPs, nurses and doctors on pre-hospital emergency care.

“Doctors can often be very nervous of performing their skills in front of an audience,” he says.

GPs want to attend his courses, “because they have not worked in hospital recently and they have lost confidence in their skills,” he explains.

“It’s my job to reassure them that they do have the knowledge and tell them it’s well within their grasp.”

Dr Agnelo Fernandes, urgent care spokesperson for the Royal College of General Practitioners says that all GPs generally have an annual refresher course in resuscitation training, which also covers burns and trauma.

“Many GPs also have background in working in an A & E departments as part of their training. GPs are part of a team in surgeries and nurses are also trained to deal with life-threatening conditions,” he says.

New equipment is also helping save more lives in emergency situations.

A device designed with the military to treating someone with a punctured lung and another device for opening airways quickly and efficiently are “absolutely life-saving”, Dr Calland says.

He also knows what it is like to attend major incident scenes with the ambulance service.

A motorcyclist’s lower leg, which was already severely damaged in a road accident, had to be amputated at the scene. Using a scalpel and some anaesthetic, Dr Calland cut through the last bits of muscle and skin to finish the job.

The concern from those working in emergency care is that medical students are not being trained appropriately to cope in emergencies.

Dr Holden explains: “There’s a danger that we are producing doctors who are too technical for our own good. The curriculum is more concerned with the touchy-feely stuff than the knowledge.”

“In an emergency you want someone who knows their job, who can work from first principles.”

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

The finishing line may still seem some way off to the athletes preparing to compete in the London 2012 Olympics but the race is already on when it comes to making sure the technology that powers it runs smoothly.

In a lab in a Canary Wharf skyscraper, results of “virtual” races are already coming in as the 70-strong technology team begins 200,000 hours of stress testing.

By the time the Olympians descend on London, that team will have grown to 5,000 and some 18,900 technology devices will be in use.

It is just a small illustration of the scale of the task.

Technology is a behind-the-scenes must-have, which can make the difference between a smooth games and a “glitch games”, as Atlanta 1996 was dubbed after IBM’s complex system for reporting results proved less than reliable.

These days people don’t just expect 100% accuracy, they expect results the millisecond after an athlete has crossed the line.

The technology of an Olympic games is “the most complex piece of project management any city undergoes,” according to Lord Coe, head of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG).

“There is the melding of well over one hundred venues. You’ve got 10,500 athletes, 4,500 paralympians, 22,0000 members of the media that turn up and expect precision with results and the kind of technology that allows them to sound terrific when they’re commentating,” he said.

It wasn’t always quite so seamless, as Olympic athlete-turned commentator Steve Cram recalls: “I used to walk into a commentary box with books and paperwork and I never 100% relied or was confident in the electronic systems” he said.

Veteran sports commentator David Coleman was even more sceptical, according to Mr Cram, using “his stopwatch more than he used to trust what was coming up on his screen”.

From an athlete’s point of view, technology is also pretty fundamental and Lord Coe remembers big differences in his days on the track: “I’d stand there, looking to see if I’d broken a record or, on a bad day, whether I was one of the qualifiers. Now it is all instantaneous,” he said.

The virtual Olympic lab will begin testing seven sports, including Athletics, tennis, basketball and triathlon and these seven alone will require half a million lines of code.

Some 880 PCs, 130 servers and 110 network switches are involved in analysing results and other crucial data created from the 35 sporting events that will be available in 2012.

By the times the Games arrive this will have grown to 900 servers, 1,000 network and security devices and 9,500 computers.

The tests simulate both normal circumstances as well as preparing the team for the unexpected, with tests of how data will be crunched in the event of a data centre fire, virus infection or other crises.

The lab is divided into 50 cells, each representing either a sporting event or a system, such as accreditation, which will rely on data.

The tech for 2012 will be the responsibility of seven partners, led by Atos Origin, the firm which has co-ordinated the technology of the last six Olympics.

Each venue has its own unique challenges, said Patrick Adiba, chief executive officer for Olympics and major events.

“At Athens some venues were only ready 24 hours before the events. In Vancouver there was no snow so they couldn’t build the finishing line.”

The challenge of London 2012 will more be about managing peoples’ expectations about technology.

There will be wi-fi in the Olympic park and data services for mobile phones are being planned but there can be no “guarantees” that network coverage will always be at the best level.

New technology for London 2012 includes myInfo, an internet application that allows media, sports officials and athletes to access competition schedules, sports records and transport news.

Cyber attacks against websites have become high profile in recent months and Mr Adiba is under no illusions about how attractive the Games will be to cyber criminals.

“We will get cyber attacks for sure,” he said.

But the nature of the system being built means such attacks are easily spotted.

“There is very little in-flow of data and if we see things coming in, we can quickly and easily see it. We are working to get the right level of defences,” he said.

One of the buzzwords of London 2012 has been “legacy” and just as the venues and the sports they support are hoping to inspire a generation to come, so the technology will have life beyond 2012.

The committee is looking at “socially useful ways” to use networks and equipment built for next year, according to LOCOG chief information officer Gerry Pennell.

The sailing venue in Portland, Dorset, for example, will require the building of a high-speed fibre network which would be a good opportunity for BT to build a bigger local network after the event.

That decision rests with BT, said Mr Pennell but the local population will be hoping for a slice of Olympic technology to remain long after the last yacht has sailed out of the harbour.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.