If you'd listened to the Queen's Speech, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the government's agenda for the next year isn't going to have a big impact on children. But changes to immigration, anti-social behaviour measures and the care system will all make a real difference - both positive and negative - to some of the most vulnerable children in the UK

It is important, particularly as families and children form the largest groups that will be affected by Universal Credit's introduction, that the government uses the pilots to identify and address any harmful effects they may experience.

The ten things you need to know on Monday 22 April... 1) 'CRUNCH WEEK' FOR OSBORNE The Telegraph says this is the "crunch week" for the chancell...

Free school meals are an effective way to help move children out of poverty. The Children's Society estimates that, if the government made them available to all children in poverty, 100,000 of these children would be lifted out of poverty straight away.

Chancellor George Osborne had failed to deliver an anti-poverty budget that would boost living standards and ease the strain on poor families. We needed an anti-poverty budget to help struggling families, but what we heard yesterday was a standstill budget for a go-slow economy.

Globally, we have made huge strides in tackling poverty through international development and foreign aid. Indeed, extreme income poverty has dropped from two billion in 1990 to less than 1.3 billion today. And incredibly, child mortality has almost halved in that time. But the gap between rich and poor children globally has grown by some 35 per cent.

Though Dickens would surely be glad to find that children are no longer sent to workhouses he would still find hungry kids and their parents in want of more food at dinnertime.

The disparities across the country are vast. Poverty levels in constituencies such as Manchester Central and Poplar and Limehouse reach over 40 per cent; in contrast, the poverty rate in the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister's constituencies is under 10 per cent.

A survey from The Children's Society recently revealed that nearly half of teachers often see children coming into school hungry, with no lunch and no means to pay for one. Six million households are struggling just to afford to heat their homes.

There has been a great deal of misleading commentary about the Child Poverty Act framework in the last few months. First of all, many make the mistake of thinking there is only one target and the targets are only about income, but as anyone can read in sections one to seven of the Act, this is completely untrue.

A key component in the mix of measures required to reduce child poverty is to make childcare more affordable to poorer families and thereby encourage more mothers into work. This is central to the approach of countries like Denmark, where 84 per cent of mothers are in employment, compared to just 67 per cent in the UK.

What do you do if you are told you are not going to meet your target to reduce child poverty? Move the target. At least that is what a group of academ...

Improving living standards by tackling the cost of living and raising household incomes will be a key battleground running up to the next General Election. Nowhere is that more important than for children living in poverty.

Telling us that the deficit is the priority when families are homeless and starving shows a government astonishingly out of touch. It needs to back its early promises, and understand that redistributing money to those that need it from those who don't deserve it (some might even say from perpetrator to victim, in a roundabout way) will demonstrate that this we really are all in this together and that it isn't redundant, dogmatic ideology that is providing the impetus.

The potentiality, and perhaps inevitably, of 2013 proving one of the most socially convulsive and ugly in Britain's social history is very real.