How Seven Up Inspired Me

I am eight lots of seven years old (56). My generation grew up with Seven Up! – a warning and hope about what we might become. Every seven years we got to see what had happened to people just a little older than us. Much of our lives, out heartbreaks and hopes, our falls and laugher, were foretold. My book, Seven Children was inspired by Michael Apted’s landmark documentary Seven Up! but is set more than sixty years later.

The original documentary film, and those that followed every seven years, focused on fourteen children born around 1957, the year when the Prime Minister told the UK it had ‘never had it so good’. In contrast, Seven Children looks at life in 2023–24, when many people have never had it so bad. The statistics used to create our seven children were published between when they were born, in 2018, and 2023, when they turned 5.

No one would blame a child for where they are in the pecking order of inequality; they are too young for anyone to see them as skivers. If a new series of Seven Up! were to be based on seven children like those in this book, the producers would certainly ensure that the children they chose were cute and camera-friendly, photogenic, and perhaps a little cheeky too. Most importantly, they would need to have parents who were not too fraught, too overprotective, too likely to pull the plug on the filming.

Apted’s Up series was intended to follow the lives of youngsters from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. But those who were chosen were not at all representative of British society, either then or now. That 1950s project sought out the extremes, not the averages, in its aim of giving the public ‘the whole picture’ of Britain’s socioeconomic diversity.

In Seven Up! Three boys came from the same private pre-prep school in London, alongside a girl with a similar posh background. If the documentaries had reflected the reality in the country as a whole, only one of the documentary’s fourteen children would have been privately educated. The other three girls in the series attended a state primary school in a poorer part of the capital. Two of the remaining seven boys lived in a charity home, and the others were hardly a random sample.

An evidence-based remake of the Up series would require the children to be representative of the country. An odd number of children would mean that one was the average child. (In Seven Children, it is David.) Seven is the minimum number of children that can also show the variation around the average, as revealed by the government-published statistics; this is because of how many children are in each of the UK’s household income brackets.

The government measures household income by splitting the population into fifths. Let’s call these five equally sized groups poor, modest, average, affluent and rich. (Those five labels are not that accurate, but they often describe a person better than that person might describe themselves. In a more equitable country, we might use the very same labels, but the poor would be less poor, and the rich less rich.)

So why not have five child profiles now, one for each of the five income brackets? The reason is because the country’s children are not evenly distributed across the five groups. If we divide the UK’s 14 million children into groups of 2 million, we get seven children—and, of these children, two would be in the bottom fifth for household income, another two in the next fifth, and then one each in the ‘top’ three fifths: 2+2+1+1+1=7. If we took only five children, one from each of the five income brackets, that would obscure this skewed weighting. It would not reflect the reality that the majority of British children come from poorer households.

Each one of the children in my book represents a seventh of all the children in the UK today. They are not at the extremes of their seven groups but are drawn—statistically—from the very middle of each. And the groups are sorted by what, above all else, most determines children’s life chances in Britain—their parents’ income. That was much less the case in the late 1950s. The UK was then becoming a melting pot.

It is demoralising to describe the deeply unequal UK our seven children have been born into, but to try to understand why their futures look so unequal on example can be done using housing, as everyone understands the necessity of housing and it is only the extremely rich who do not hold the majority of their wealth in housing.

In 2019 the government calculated from council tax data that there were at least 648,114 empty (unfurnished) homes in England—a 2.2 per cent increase on the previous year—of which at least 225,845 had been empty for over six months. Those empty properties are all someone’s assets.

Although the powers existed for them to do so, rarely did local authorities do anything to bring vacant dwellings back into use. Some 5.5 million people, or one in nine of all UK adults, owned at least one spare home, worth some £1 trillion in total. Very few of these owners were people with young children. They were almost all richer older people; and among them were the 1.9 million adults who were buy-to-let landlords. However, the Resolution Foundation report that these statistics appeared in also explained that, although only 37 per cent of adults owned any property by the age of 29 (down from half of all 29-year-olds just two decades earlier), 7 per cent of adults owned multiple properties by that age. Wealth inequalities had risen.

Our seven children’s futures are unwritten. Because they are taken from the middle, not the bottom, of each household income group, none of them are living in destitution. But in the future, one of these children could well become homeless. It happened to one of the boys in Michael Apted’s Seven Up! documentary series. According to the official statistics for England, in 2018—the year our seven children were born—at any one time there were 124,000 children living in temporary accommodation provided by a local authority. This number had almost doubled in a decade, and it might well be higher in future. To be precise, it had increased by 80 per cent since 2010, so by the time the children in my book are aged 7, in 2025, it may have risen to around 200,000 children at any one time who are housed in temporary accommodation. And to that figure you have to add the hidden homeless: ‘In 2016–17 there were 92,000 children living in sofa-surfing families. 56,880 or 68 per cent of the families in temporary accommodation are in London.’ By the end of June 2023, the total was 82,360 homeless children in London. Far more had been pushed out of the capital and were homeless elsewhere.

In the September 2023 official government snapshot survey, sixty-seven children and adults under age 25 who had left local authority care were found sleeping rough in the UK, including three in London. It seems clear that the survey data is wanting; for London, there is better rough-sleeping data from other sources. In 2022–23, outreach services in London found that some 589 people sleeping rough in London that year, or 8 per cent of all rough sleepers, had had experience of the care system.

The story above is an edited extract from the book seven children. It shows how statistics de-humanize but also reveal when thing are actually getting much worse, as they have bene doing for some decades. Why have we not been told that the situation is getting worse? Because those who get to tell the stories of our times invariably come now come from privilege. When inequalities widen, as they have relentless over the course of the last fifty years, opportunities narrow. We become worse at seeing ourselves. However, eventually, the reality becomes too stark to ignore.

‘Seven Children – Inequality and Britain’s Next Generation’ was published by Hurst in September 2024: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/seven-children/

For a link to where originally published and a PDF of the article click here.

The original Seven Up children as adults