Meg Thomas 13 hours ago
Every year, thousands of children from Armed Forces families have experiences that we know are part of Service life.
A parent deploys or begins a period of intensive training. A family receives a new posting order. A child leaves friends and a community behind as they learn to navigate a new community and support network. A child changes school, often into a completely different curriculum, and feels like they are playing catch up. Eventually, many families transition out of military life altogether.
That this might happen to any Forces child is not unexpected, yet our public systems do not always prepare for the consequences of these events. Frequently, Forces children are only offered support when specific challenges emerge: a drop in educational attainment or mental health, the escalation of global conflict, or when families reach the threshold for specialist services.
Systems are often designed to react rather than anticipate, but there is another way.
There is mounting evidence that adopting a Public Health Approach to tackle complex non-health challenges makes a difference (see Vision Zero Manchester and The ACE Hub Wales for UK examples) A Public Health Approach starts with a simple principle. If we can predict where whole populations are most likely to encounter challenges, we should strengthen the systems around them, preventing challenges from becoming crises.
A Rights-Informed Approach shifts policy from doing things for people to working with them. It embeds human rights into decision-making by ensuring people have a meaningful say in the issues that affect them, empowers people to understand and claim their rights, and ensures those with duties are accountable for delivering them.
A Rights-Informed Public Health Approach (RIPHA) can improve outcomes for Forces children by addressing the wider factors that influence children’s lives through coordinated action across systems.
This approach will embed Forces children’s rights across the policies, services and organisations that shape their lives. It ensures that they are part of creating solutions and that responsibility for upholding rights is shared across systems rather than resting on individual children or families.
For Armed Forces families, this means recognising mobility, separation, reintegration, bereavement and transition as predictable features of military life.
Not all Forces children are vulnerable. Most of them thrive, developing adaptability and a sense of identity through their experiences. However, these experiences can create vulnerabilities for them as a group, and thriving should not depend on children’s ability to navigate fragmented systems.
The Forces Children’s Rights Charter reminds us that children have the right to be heard, understood, included and supported. Public Health provides the delivery mechanism. Together they create a powerful new idea: rights-informed prevention.
Instead of asking ‘How do we respond when children struggle?’ this approach asks, ‘How do we design education, health and family support systems to anticipate predictable aspects of Service life so they do not become preventable disadvantage?’
The Armed Forces Covenant is a UK-wide obligation for public bodies to remove disadvantage created by Service life. The Forces Children’s Rights Charter articulates what children need to flourish. Public Health approaches demonstrates that prevention of disadvantage is more effective than crisis response – and can prevent those crises to begin with.
I suggest it’s time to bring these ideas together. In our next blog, we’ll explore what this means in practice and why taking a Rights-Informed Public Health Approach to create continuity of wellbeing should become the guiding principle for supporting children from Armed Forces families across the UK.
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