In the UK 14 million people live in poverty. Four million of these are children. The level of child poverty is rising, and the rate is projected to accelerate in coming years. Growing up in a deprived environment can have a profoundly negative effect on a child’s development. Children from deprived backgrounds are more likely to be placed in special education, fail courses, and complete fewer years of schooling. But the adversities children encounter extend well beyond economic hardship and incorporate multiple familial factors like chaotic home life, poor parental mental and physical health, lack of community support, poor schooling and communication difficulties. These factors have a well-documented impact on multiple child outcomes including educational attainment, mental health, and behaviour. This is a global problem. Up to 50% of children and adolescents growing up worldwide experience at least one episode of childhood adversity in early life: 30% of all mental health problems are attributable to such adversity. The effects are also persistent – early adversity can set a life-long trajectory associated with poor physical and mental well-being and significantly worse occupational and economic outcomes. This results in an inter-generational cycle of disadvantage where deprivation impacts each subsequent generation. Supporting young people who face adversity is one of the major modern challenges for educators, practitioners and policy-makers, as they work to reduce educational under-attainment, poor economic outcomes and address the burgeoning mental health crisis.

Yet not all children who face adversity go on to experience poor outcomes: certain factors appear to insulate children from hardship, such that they demonstrate resilience (broadly defined as succeeding in a particular domain, such as education, despite experiencing adversity). Resilience within mental health is an increasingly recognised phenomenon, but our knowledge about which factors foster resilience across a broader range of outcomes, different populations and in response to diverse sources of adversity is currently limited. Understanding the cross-domain factors that promote resilience is vital to drive the development of interventions that improve the outcomes of child and adolescent victims of adversity. This is the purpose of our project. We want to explore how different environmental factors interact with cognitive and brain development, whether particular features of a child's environment are most strongly linked with these outcomes, and whether some factors foster resilience.