Giddens and social investment in childhood: what Europe learned, and what Spain should do

When Anthony Giddens set out the Third Way in 1998, he asked the welfare state to change its main job, from protecting people after things go wrong to investing in what they can do before. He called the result a social investment state. Our week 1 piece looked at how the idea is doing in the EU across employment, childcare and adult learning. This one follows it into childhood, where Europe has taken the idea furthest and learned the most, and where Spain has the most to gain.

From an idea to an EU instrument

The European Commission put social investment in childhood on paper in February 2013, in a recommendation titled Investing in children: breaking the cycle of disadvantage. It rests on three pillars: access to adequate resources, including support for parents' route into work and a mix of cash and in-kind benefits; access to affordable, quality services, above all early childhood education and care and healthcare; and children's right to take part in play, sport, culture and the decisions that affect them. The Commission's own summary gives the economic case in a sentence: correcting the effects of childhood poverty later in life costs far more than supporting children while they are young. A European platform, EPIC, collected evidence from 2013 to 2021.

In June 2021 the Council turned that into the European Child Guarantee. Member states committed that children at risk of poverty or social exclusion would have free early childhood education and care, free education including school activities and at least one healthy meal each school day, free healthcare, healthy nutrition and adequate housing. Each country has a coordinator and an action plan to 2030, and reports every two years. Countries with child poverty above the EU average should spend at least 5% of their European Social Fund Plus on it. On 6 May 2026, alongside the first EU Anti-Poverty Strategy, the Commission moved to strengthen the Guarantee, including a trial of a Child Guarantee card to make the services easier to reach, as the Brussels Times reported. The EU target remains to lift 5 million children out of poverty or social exclusion by 2030.

What Europe learned

The biggest lesson came from researchers who looked at who uses social investment services. Joakim Palme and Axel Cronert's 2015 paper on Sweden, written for the EU-funded ImPRovE project, summarises the debate. Bea Cantillon and others warned of "Matthew effects", named after the Gospel verse about those who have being given more: unless carefully designed, social services in rich welfare states tend to benefit mainly the middle classes. In childcare, parents with less education use places less, partly because one of them is more likely to be out of work.

Palme and Cronert also show that the effect can be beaten. Van Lancker and Ghysels found Swedish childcare more redistributive than Belgian, and traced the difference to guaranteed, sufficient access and higher employment among low-skilled women. Verbist and Matsaganis found that across 21 EU countries services reduce poverty among working-age households more than cash transfers do, largely because services are bigger. The Swedish authors' conclusion: quasi-universal services, combined with jobs for mothers at every skill level, are the heart of an enlightened social investment strategy.

Spain, by the numbers

Spain is where the lesson bites hardest. Eurostat put the share of children at risk of poverty or social exclusion at 34.6% in 2024, the second highest in the EU after Bulgaria (35.1%), against an EU average of 24.2%. The INE's 2025 Living Conditions Survey measured 33.9% for children under 16, down from 34.7%, and still the highest of any age group.

Spain has built the tools. In June 2026 the minimum living income (IMV) reached 860,458 households, 591,436 of them with children, and its child supplement went to 600,076 households, at an average of €67.10 per child a month. But AIReF, the fiscal watchdog, found in February 2026 that the IMV and the child supplement together reach only 29% of households in child poverty, with a non-take-up rate of 55%. That is a Matthew effect in cash form: the families furthest from the administration are the ones who miss out. On services, our proposal yesterday on early years education from 0 to 3 found the same pattern, with the poorest fifth of children far less likely to attend.

The proposal: a Matthew test

The left is right that children have a right to free, good services and enough income at home, because disadvantage in childhood is inherited unless the State breaks the chain. Halstead and Lind's radical centre placed education and assets at birth for the same reason. The market-liberal side is right that this spending should be judged as an investment, by what it returns, and that a parent's job is the strongest single route out of child poverty, which is why the 2013 recommendation put it in its first pillar.

What fits neither camp is to measure the Matthew effect directly and make every programme answer for it. A Matthew test for Spain:

• Every programme that invests in children, from 0-3 places, school meals and dental care to the child supplement and extracurricular grants, publishes each year who uses it, by income fifth, using the tax and Social Security data the State already holds.
• Any programme where the poorest fifth uses it less than the richest is redesigned that year: automatic offers, outreach through health centres and schools, and first claim on places.
• Spain volunteers for the Commission's Child Guarantee card trial and links the card to the IMV and child supplement files, so that eligibility for the services is recognised once, everywhere.
• The ESF+ money for children is allocated only to programmes that pass the test or have a plan to.

Giddens wanted a State that invests in people. Europe's experience adds that an investment only counts if it reaches the children it was meant for, and Spain has the data to check that, programme by programme, every year.