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Financial transfers to families with children form a core element of welfare state provision. Variation in the design, generosity and implementation of this provision is significant, reflecting underlying perspectives towards children and families and the state's role in supporting them. Daly developed a new typology of social policy for children, differentiating between 'childhood-oriented', 'child-oriented' and 'family-oriented' policies. In this article, we propose an extension to this typology with financial transfers in mind. We divide the family-oriented category into two distinct types of policy – 'needs-oriented' and 'adult-behaviour-oriented', with the latter encapsulating support that is child-contingent but conditional on the behaviour of adults in the household. We argue that this new distinction is needed to make sense of recent significant changes to social security support for children in the UK, in particular the two-child limit and the benefit cap. We go on to analyse child benefits across Europe through the lens of this extended framework. Significantly, we find the UK's approach to be unusual but not exceptional, with other examples of children being rendered invisible or semi-visible within social security systems. Across diverse national contexts, support for children is being withdrawn (or is simply absent) because of the behaviours and circumstances of the adults in their household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its significance in determining poverty risk, family size has received little focus in recent social policy analysis. This paper provides a correction, focusing squarely on the changing poverty risk of larger families (those with three or more dependent children) in the UK over recent years. It argues that we need to pay much closer attention to how and why poverty risk differs according to family size. Our analysis of Family Resource Survey data reveals how far changes in child poverty rates since 1997 – both falling poverty risk to 2012/13 and increases since then – have been concentrated in larger families. Social security changes are identified as central: these have affected larger families most as they have greater need for support, due to both lower work intensity and higher household needs. By interrogating the way policy change has affected families of different sizes the paper seeks to increase understanding of the effects of different poverty reduction strategies, with implications for policy debates in the UK and beyond. In providing evidence about the socio-demographics of larger families and their changing poverty risk it also aims to inform contested debates about the state's role in providing financial support for children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The benefit cap and the two‐child limit reduce entitlement for households claiming means‐tested benefits and disproportionately affect households with dependent children. This article explores the harms the policies are doing to children through drawing upon data collected from interviews with parents affected by the benefit cap and the two‐child limit. To investigate the impacts of these policies we draw on the Investment Model and the Family Stress Model, models principally developed by quantitative scholars seeking to understand how economic disadvantage adversely affects children over the longer‐term. While there has been frequent quantitative analysis of these models, there has been very little qualitative engagement with them: this article directly addresses this gap in the literature. We show that the benefit cap and the two‐child limit cause multiple and severe overlapping harms to children, principally by exacerbating and deepening financial economic disadvantage. Our research evidence illuminates causal processes underpinning both the Investment Model and the Family Stress Model, but also reveals additional harms that are not foregrounded by either model. We conclude by calling for the removal of both policies as a vital first step in reducing child poverty, and further reflect on the need for greater recognition of the harm child poverty does to experiences of childhood; as well as to their future selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early education provision in the state‐maintained sector has historically played an important role in ensuring equitable access to high‐quality early education in England. These settings have higher qualification requirements than other providers, and as they have been concentrated in areas of higher disadvantage, children from lower income households have been more likely to attend them. This paper shows that this phenomenon is changing: children from lower income households are considerably less likely to attend maintained settings than they were in 2010. Their higher likelihood compared with other children is also declining, while the share attending private nursery settings has increased sharply. Using the National Pupil Database, the paper explores the reasons why, identifying three main factors: a general decline in maintained provision across the country, probably linked to changes in national funding practices; changes in the geography of poverty; and the extension of free early education places to disadvantaged 2‐year‐olds, which inadvertently led to children entering and remaining in lower quality settings. The paper illustrates the inherent trade‐off policymakers face between expanding early childhood education and care provision and maintaining the quality necessary for services to function as social investment. It contributes both to early childhood education and care policy studies in England and to the wider international literature on mixed economy approaches to early childhood education and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the labour market effects of lowering the UK's benefit cap in 2016. This policy limits the total amount a working‐age non‐disabled household with no‐one in employment can receive in social security. We treat the sharp reduction in this benefit cap as a natural experiment, comparing those at risk of being capped and those who were not before and after the cap was lowered. Drawing on data from ~500,000 individuals, we find that this reform reduced unemployment compared to those not at risk of being capped. The reform also increased economic inactivity, partly because the cap harmed mental health but also because those at risk of being capped were eligible to claim disability‐related welfare payments that made them exempt. Limiting total monthly welfare payments of low‐income families may increase employment for some but it can also push others out of the labour market altogether. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over a decade, all three-year-olds in England have been entitled to a free part-time early education place. One aim of this policy is to close developmental gaps between higher-income and low-income children. However, the success of the initiative depends on children accessing the places. Using the National Pupil Database, we examine all autumn-born four-year-olds attending in January 2011, and ask whether they started attending when first eligible, in January 2010. One in five children did not access their free place from the beginning, and the proportion is much higher among children from families with persistently low incomes. We also find differences by ethnicity and home language, but these factors explain only a small share of the income gradient. We go on to explore associations between non-take-up and local area factors. In areas with higher child poverty rates, take-up is lower overall, but the gap between low-income and other families is smaller. There are also various associations between take-up and local proportions of different provider types (maintained, private, voluntary, Sure Start). In particular, the voluntary sector seems to have more flexibility than maintained provision to offer places in January, and more success than private providers in reaching children from lower-income backgrounds. The analysis also highlights how take-up overall is relatively high and the gap by income level is smaller in areas with more Sure Start provision. This suggests that aspects of Sure Start facilitated access among low-income families, and could perhaps be replicated as implementation of the free entitlement continues to be expanded.

This paper examines how the quality of early childhood education and care accessed by 3- and 4-year-olds in England varies by children's background. Focusing on the free entitlement to early education, the analysis combines information from three administrative datasets for 2010-2011, the Early Years Census, the Schools Census and the Ofsted inspections dataset, to obtain two main indicators of quality: staff qualification levels and Ofsted ratings. These data are combined with child-level indicators of area deprivation (IDACI scores) as a proxy measure of children's background. The paper finds that children from more disadvantaged areas have access to better qualified staff, largely because they are more likely than children from richer areas to attend maintained nursery classes staffed by teachers, and less likely to attend services in the private, voluntary and independent (PVI) sectors. However, "within" both maintained and PVI sectors, services catering for more disadvantaged children receive poorer quality ratings from Ofsted, with a higher concentration of children from disadvantaged areas itself appearing to reduce the likelihood of top Ofsted grades. This may be in part because Ofsted ratings reflect levels of child development, and therefore reward settings where children enter at a more advanced starting point, but it may also be that it is genuinely harder to deliver an outstanding service to a more disadvantaged intake. The results point to the need for funding to support better qualified staff in PVI settings in disadvantaged areas.

Unemployment and GDP are widely used as proxies for a broader concept of well-being in the European Union, especially at regional level. This paper asks whether such an approach is reasonable. Using data from a range of sources, it examines the association between unemployment, GDP and a number of alternative well-being indicators in five domains--material welfare, education, health, productive activity and social participation. It finds that GDP per capita is not a good proxy for wider regional well-being within a country, but that the regional unemployment rate performs reasonably well. Pooling fifteen member states together, however, regional GDP is a better predictor of a region's well-being than unemployment. This is because national GDP tells us more about how a country is doing overall than the national unemployment rate. These findings have implications for the European Council's decision to treat variation in the regional unemployment rates as the sole indicator of regional inequality within Member States, and for the allocation of the Structural Funds.

To authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-923X.2009.02013.x Byline: KITTY STEWART (1) Keywords: New Labour; inequality; poverty; social mobility; equal opportunity Abstract: In its first years in office, the Labour Government set out a wide-ranging and ambitious set of policies aimed at reducing poverty, inequality and social exclusion. A decade on, with the party facing probable catastrophic defeat in the next general election, how far can these ambitions be said to have been met? This article summarises the evidence. It also examines the most recent government White Paper on social mobility, New Opportunities: Fair Chances for the Future, published in January 2009, and asks whether this paper represents a serious last attempt to renew the equal opportunities agenda. Author Affiliation: (1)Lecturer in Social Policy at the LSE.

In this paper, we examine the mental health effects of lowering the UK's benefit cap in 2016. This policy limits the total amount a household with no‐one in full‐time employment can receive in social security. We treat the reduction in the cap as a natural policy experiment, comparing those at risk of being capped and those who were not, and examining the risk of experiencing poor mental health both before and after the cap was lowered. Drawing on data from ~900,000 individuals, we find that the prevalence of depression or anxiety among those at risk of being capped increased by 2.6 percentage points (95% confidence interval: 1.33–3.88) compared with those at a low risk of being capped. Capping social security may increase the risk of mental ill health and could have the unintended consequence of pushing out‐of‐work people even further away from the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While social policy falls predominantly under national rather than European Union (EU) jurisdiction, there are nonetheless multiple ways in which social policy and social outcomes in EU member states have been affected by EU membership. This paper draws on existing evidence and analysis to review the consequences for UK social policy of the decision to leave the EU. We focus predominantly on the implications of the British government's pledge to 'take back control' of money, borders and laws. Our conclusion is that Brexit is likely to have negative effects on the quality of public services and, for some groups in particular, social rights, and that these effects are likely to be greater the more distant are the future trading and wider relationships between the UK and the EU27. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Denmark, the Republic of Ireland and the UK joined the European Communities in 1973, their governments were required to transpose into domestic law all the treaty commitments previously negotiated by the six founding member states. A chapter on social policy in the 1957 Treaty, conceptualised as a necessary component of economic integration, was designed to prevent distortion of the rules of competition and ensure a high standard of social protection for workers. Although successive UK governments strongly supported the concept of a single European market, they resisted the notion of a European 'social superstate' or 'social union'. They opposed the extension of qualified majority voting to social security and favoured softer forms of social legislation to preserve national sovereignty over social protection systems. This article attempts to make sense, firstly, of the role played by the social dimension during the UK's membership of the European Union, the referendum campaign and Brexit negotiations; and, secondly, of the direct and indirect implications of Brexit for the future development of social and employment policy in both the EU and the UK. The authors consider the implications for the EU's social agenda, and for employment rights, public service provision and living standards in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the association between mothers’ involvement in paid employment when their children are young and their later employment prospects. Using 17 waves of the British Household Panel Survey (1997–2007), it examines the employment trajectories of 954 women for the decade after the birth of their youngest child, asking two main questions. Do mothers who enter or return to work tend to remain in employment? And do wages and job satisfaction further down the line (when the youngest child reaches ten years old) reflect the pathway taken? The article focuses in particular on differences between women with higher- and lower-level qualifications. Mothers are found to be following a variety of employment pathways, with instability relatively common: more than one in three move in and out of work over the period, and this movement is just as common among mothers with higher levels of qualifications as among those with only GCSE-level qualifications or none at all. A stable – and longer – work history is associated with increased wages later on, but the benefits are greater for women with higher levels of qualifications, as might be predicted by human capital theory. Women who were more highly qualified and who moved in and out of work over the decade had an hourly wage when their youngest child was ten which was 31 per cent lower than similar women with a stable work history; for women with few or no qualifications the corresponding figure was 10 per cent and statistically insignificant. For both groups, job satisfaction at the end of the decade was unrelated to the pathway taken. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

UK government policy encourages mothers of young children in low-income families to enter or return to work, via tax credit subsidies and support for childcare. Maternal employment is seen a central plank in the campaign against child poverty, both because it raises income immediately and because working now is seen as paving the way to better employment prospects in the future. But there is little evidence about medium- and long-term outcomes for mothers entering low-skilled employment. We know little about how likely such women are to remain in work, let alone how likely they are to progress to higher-skilled and better-paid jobs. This article uses the British Lone Parent Cohort, a data set which tracked lone mothers from 1991 to 2001, to examine employment trajectories for up to 560 mothers with a youngest child under five at the start of the period. It creates a typology of trajectories over the decade, identifying the share of women broadly stable in work, those remaining at home and those following unstable pathways between the two. It goes on to explore the factors associated with different pathways, asking whether individual and household characteristics, job characteristics, or changes in circumstances such as new health problems are most important. Finally, the article examines differences in wage progression across groups of women following different pathways, and similarly tries to identify the main factors associated with faster progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic collapse in the former communist bloc saw the erosion of financial support and services for young children. Since 1998 even the poorer countries of the bloc have seen a return to economic growth. But have the benefits been felt by children? Drawing on administrative and household survey data, this article examines three aspects of government support for young children - maternity benefit, child allowances and preschool provision - in four countries in different parts of the region: Bulgaria, Albania, Moldova and Tajikistan. The article concludes that these services remain vastly inadequate. In some countries child allowances are well targeted towards poorer households, but are too small in size to have an impact. Preschool overwhelmingly benefits urban families and the better-off, while paid maternity leave is increasingly rare. Given what is known about the long-term impact of both early education and early childhood poverty, the findings are of considerable concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the patterns of regional disparities in the European Union. Coefficient of variation; Economic indicators; Poverty rates; Mortality rate.

Examines the impact of the European Union enlargement on the national poverty line-based poverty and social exclusion indicators analysis. United Nations Development Program and European Community Household Panel human poverty indexes; Average poverty rate decrease due to a decrease in average incomes; Increase in the scope of the poverty and exclusion measures.

Compares three measures of child well-being between Great Britain and the European Union. Child poverty; Children in workless homes; Teenage birth rate; Need to be ashamed over the child poverty gap, rather than the productivity gap.

The article deals with a study on the impact of government policy on the state of poverty and inequality in Great Britain since 1997. Aside from considering public attitudes to poverty and inequality, the study also looked into the challenges brought by recessions and aging society. According to the researchers, the situation in Great Britain has improved since the introduction of policy in 1997. The study shows that the government has succeeded in reducing child poverty and in minimizing the economic gaps between deprived and other areas.