Early this year the Government is set to publish its long awaited levelling up White Paper – it may even be published by the time you read this. Levelling up will mean many things to different people and we of course will have our own priority areas. As a director of children's services, I see first-hand the impact of poverty and inequality on children and their outcomes. The levelling up White Paper presents an ideal opportunity to address these issues which will have only been worsened by the pandemic.

For children's services, levelling up must involve investment in the variety of services that support children but also investment in children and families themselves. More than four million children in the UK are currently living in poverty, 75% of whom are in working families. If we are to give these children the best start in life, we need to begin with tackling the causes of child poverty and be ambitious for them.