As part of its strategy to promote social mobility, the government is piloting a scheme of child development grants.1 Disadvantaged families will be offered up to £200 (€233; $335) as long as they attend and take up services offered by Children’s Centres, including parenting advice, liaison with job centres, and identification of children with special educational needs. The idea is modelled on the conditional cash transfer schemes from Latin America that offer disadvantaged families money if mothers attend parenting seminars, infants attend health check-ups, and other stipulations are met such as compliance with immunisation and school enrolment. Although increasingly imitated, such schemes are controversial because they explicitly intertwine social mobility with behaviour change. Some unfavourable health, education, and nutrition choices cluster with, and partly determine, socioeconomic disadvantage, and engagement with public services is thought to stimulate positive behaviour change. Conditional cash transfer schemes further assume that targeted cash incentives will secure such engagement. The same reasoning underpins the UK government’s child development grants.

Here we consider UK experience in promoting social mobility and behaviour change and review the international evidence on conditional cash transfer schemes to throw light on how such schemes should be designed.