Search

This overview report provides an assessment of social policy developments under the three Conservative Governments that were in power between May 2015 and the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. The report provides a comprehensive examination of developments in ten major areas of social policy (social security; employment; early childhood; compulsory school age education; higher education; health; social care; physical safety and security; homelessness / complex needs; and social mobility) over this period. In assessing social policies and social inequalities on the eve of the pandemic, we identify five key cross-cutting major weaknesses and structural limitations of the welfare state and public services. In assessing outcomes across different social policy areas, we find there is overwhelming evidence that a break in social progress across multiple critical areas of life had already occurred prior to the public health emergency and the economic and social shocks that it triggered. Across the social policy areas that we examine, many key indicators of social progress had already slowed down, stalled or gone into reverse prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, looking forward, and as an input into broader discussions and debates about what is needed as the country transitions into the recovery phase from COVID-19, we set out five key cross-cutting social policy challenges for the 2020s.

This paper examines responses to a 2012-13 government consultation on child poverty measurement. It explores what these responses tell us about attitudes towards the child poverty indicators in the Child Poverty Act 2010, and about the extent of support for a broader approach to measurement. The study was motivated by the amendments to the Child Poverty Act put forward by the Conservative Government in 2015. Using a Freedom of Information request, we gained access to 251 of the 257 consultation responses, which came from individuals and organisations with a wide range of expertise, including academics, local authorities, frontline services and children’s charities. Our analysis finds strong support for the original suite of measures and near universal support for keeping income at the heart of poverty measurement; poverty is understood primarily to be a relative lack of material resources, with income widely believed to be the best proxy measure. While there is considerable support for capturing information around other dimensions, these are generally seen as causes or consequences of poverty, or as broader life chance measures, not as measures of child poverty itself. The paper also considers the government’s published summary of the consultation responses, and discusses differences between the government’s interpretation and our own.

This paper summarises the output of a Nuffield-funded research project exploring inequalities in three aspects of children’s experience in early education in England. The main focus of the project was on ‘peer effects’ in pre-school settings: we examine the extent of clustering by income and language background and explore associations between pre-school peer group and children’s outcomes in early primary school. The report also presents findings on access to the full duration of the free entitlement to early education, and on variation in children’s experience of the transition onward to reception class. We find much lower levels of clustering in pre-schools in England than have been identified in studies for the US, particularly by income, and little evidence that pre-school peer group is related to early school attainment as assessed by teachers in reception and Year 2. But we identify significant levels of non-take-up of the full entitlement, particularly among disadvantaged groups. A higher prevalence in the local authority of some types of pre-school appears to make a difference: more voluntary sector or Sure Start provision is associated with higher take-up, while more Sure Start provision is further associated with lower inequalities in access between different groups. We also find disparities in the stability of transitions to reception class. In the cohort we examine, children from lowincome backgrounds and some minority ethnic groups are much more likely to experience the most secure transition – from a school nursery class to a reception class in the same school, with high numbers of known peers – because they are more likely to be in school nurseries to begin with. But among those attending school nurseries, some groups, including Black Caribbean children and those with a statement of special educational needs, are significantly less likely than others to continue to reception in that school. The disparity is of potential concern given wider disadvantag

This report provides an update to Does Money Affect Children’s Outcomes?: A Systematic Review, published in October 2013. Using systematic search approaches, we review the literature examining the relationship between household financial resources and children’s outcomes, focusing on OECD countries and on the last fifty years. We include studies looking at children’s health, cognitive development and social, emotional and behavioural development, as well as studies on relevant intermediate outcomes, including the home environment and maternal mental health and health behaviours. Studies are only included if they use methods that allow us to reach conclusions about causal relationships: this includes randomised controlled experiments, quasi-experimental situations, and longitudinal studies tracking both financial resources and outcomes over time. The update adds 27 new studies to the 34 in the original review, and slightly expands the country coverage, although the evidence base remains heavily US-focused. The studies provide strong evidence that income has causal effects on a wide range of children’s outcomes, especially in households on low incomes to begin with. We conclude that reducing income poverty can be expected to have a significant impact on children’s environment and on their development.

This CASEbrief summarises findings from a research project, 'The childcare puzzle: how can we improve both quality and affordability?'

This paper examines how the quality of formal early childhood education and care is associated with children’s background. By using different indicators of quality, the research also explored how the relationship varies depending on the way quality is measured. The analysis combines information from three administrative datasets – the Early Years Census, the Schools Census and the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) dataset on inspections (2010-11). The results suggest that children from disadvantaged background have access to better qualified staff. However, services catering for more disadvantaged children are more segregated and receive poorer quality ratings from Ofsted, the national inspectorate.

This is the first major report in a wider programme assessing the impact of the recession, government policy reforms and public spending on poverty and inequality in the UK. Later work will assess the Coalition’s social policy record, in the very different economic and fiscal climate of 2010-2014. As a baseline, this paper looks at what Labour did, at what cost, and with what impact on people’s lives.

When Labour came to power in 1997 it made commitments to reduce poverty and improve children’s health, education and wider life chances. Early childhood was considered central to the strategy, and considerable resources were invested in very young children. This paper examines the main policies introduced affecting children under five, including longer maternity leave, Sure Start Children’s Centres, free early education for all three and four year olds, more affordable and higher quality childcare, and more generous financial support for families with children, both in and out of work. The paper draws on government statistics and evaluations as well as wider evidence from a range of independent sources to examine where increased spending went, and with what impact. Children’s outcomes improved on a range of measures during this period. Child poverty fell from one in three to one in four in households with a youngest child under five. Low birthweight and infant mortality rates (IMR) fell, and Foundation Stage Profile results improved. In all three measures gaps between different social groups narrowed. Research evaluations, where available, point to small but significant effects of particular policies, including Sure Start, the Neighbourhood Nurseries Initiative and the Graduate Leader Fund. However, in the absence of more widespread evidence from evaluations it is difficult to attribute changes in outcomes directly to changes in policy. The paper discusses these challenges and considers a series of ‘tests’ of Labour’s impact, including whether improvements represent a change in a longer-term trend, and, where possible, how outcomes compare in international terms.

This report examines whether money has a causal impact on children’s outcomes. There is abundant evidence that children growing up in lower income households do less well than their peers on a range of wider outcomes, including measures of health and education. But is money important in itself, or do these associations simply reflect other differences between richer and poorer households, such as levels of parental education or attitudes towards parenting? Children in low-income households do less well than their better-off peers on many outcomes in life, such as education or health, simply because they are poorer. While a parent's level of education, attitude towards bringing up children and other parental factors also have a bearing, research shows that having more money directly improves the development and level of achievement of children. Increases in family income substantially reduce differences in schooling outcomes and improve wider aspects of a child’s well-being. Cognitive development and school achievement were most improved by having more money. Conversely, reductions in family income, including benefit cuts, are likely to have wide-ranging negative effects. Money seems to have more of an effect among low-income families.

Maternal employment formed a central plank in the former Labour Government’s strategy to reduce child poverty. Even where potential jobs were low-skilled and low-paid, policy was explicitly work (rather than training) first, and lone parents in particular were given direct and indirect financial subsidies to enter employment of any kind. The explicit assumption was that a low-paid job would be a stepping-stone to better things. From 2008 a little more stick was introduced to what had been a largely carrot-based approach to encouraging employment, a shift that has continued under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government in power from May 2010. However, there is little evidence in practice that a low-paid job when one’s child is young is a reliable route to improved future prospects. This paper uses the British Household Panel Survey to explore this issue further. It examines the employment trajectories of 929 women for the ten years after the birth of their youngest child, asking two main questions. Do mothers tend to remain in employment once they have taken a job? And do wages and other employment outcomes further down the line (when their youngest child is ten) reflect the employment pathway taken? In both cases the paper focuses in particular on differences between women with higher and lower levels of qualifications. The paper finds mothers following a variety of employment pathways, with instability much more common than steady work trajectories. One in three mothers moves in and out of work over the decade after the birth of their youngest child, and this is true for both lower-skilled and higher-skilled mothers. Stable work histories do appear to carry benefits in terms of wages when the youngest reaches ten, but the benefits are substantially higher for women with higher levels of qualifications, as might be predicted by human capital theory. More highly qualified women who moved in and out of work over the decade had an hourly wage at ten whic

This CASEbrief reports on the findings of recent research examining the employment pathways followed by mothers entering low-skilled work. The project was originally framed under a Labour Government which placed considerable emphasis on encouraging women back into work when their children were relatively young (pre-school age), first through tax credits and childcare subsidies and subsequently with greater compulsion. A central justification underlying the provision of greater financial support to mothers in employment than to those staying at home was the assumption – frequently expressed in government documents – that even a low-skilled job was a stepping-stone to improved prospects, with a long-run pay-off both for mothers and for the Treasury. We wanted to know how justified this assumption was: how often did mothers’ low-skilled work result in stable employment and progression up the earnings distribution out of low pay?

This paper uses panel data from the British Families and Children Study to analyse the employment patterns of women with children and the ways in which part-time work and interruptions in paid employment influence the wages of working mothers. It pays particular attention to how the relationship between employment trajectory and wage progression compares for higher-skilled and lower-skilled mothers and for mothers of younger and older children. We find that mothers follow a wide variety of employment pathways, the majority working part-time, moving between full-time and part-time employment or moving in and out of work as they combine motherhood with paid employment. In support of results from existing research on the “part-time” wage penalty and the “motherhood gap”, we find that there are wage penalties associated with unstable work trajectories. Our analysis also shows that such wage penalties are significantly smaller for lower-skilled than higher-skilled women and are experienced by mothers of children of all ages, although the impact appears larger for mothers of younger children. In the final sections, the paper discusses the policy implications that arise from these findings with reference to recent debates on maternal employment, wage progression and poverty reduction.

The Lisbon summit of the European Council in March 2000 declared the number of people living in poverty and social exclusion in the European Union to be unacceptable, and called for steps to tackle the issue, beginning with the setting of targets for particular indicators. The targets suggested have been broad in nature but have largely concentrated on national averages. This paper seeks to marry this approach with the EU¿s traditional focus on regional cohesion, by developing regional indicators of well-being and exclusion for EU countries. It draws on a range of sources to put together indicators in five dimensions of well-being: material well-being, health, education and participation in two spheres ¿ productive and social. It explores, first, how far national indicators disguise geographical inequalities in these different dimensions; and second, the extent to which regional performance differs according to which dimension is being examined. At the same time, the paper draws attention to the limits of currently available data, in light of the fact that one key aspect of the Lisbon summit conclusions was a commitment to the collection of better data on poverty and social exclusion in the EU.

Recent government pronouncements in the UK and above all the recent Conservative Party (2008) policy document on welfare reform suggest that US welfare reform is increasingly being taken as a model for the UK. What lessons should the UK draw from US experience? The long established means tested programme for needy families known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was replaced in 1996 with a welfare to work programme known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The historical background and features of the new program are elaborated and the way it has been implemented in varied ways in different states is documented. The findings of a number of outcome studies assessing the programme’s impact and effectiveness are reviewed. Three commentaries on the paper consider how far American experience should be a guide to welfare policy in Britain. With commentaries by Kitty Stewart, David Piachaud and Howard Glennerster

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 paper uses a dataset which tracked lone mothers from 1991 to 2001 to examine employment trajectories for 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 broadly stable 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 circumstantial factors such as re-partnering are most important. Finally, the paper examines differences in wage progression across groups of women following different pathways, and similarly tries to identify the main factors associated with faster progress.

When Labour came to power in 1997 it made commitments to reduce poverty and improve children’s health, education and wider life chances. Early childhood was considered central to the strategy, and considerable resources were invested in very young children. This paper examines the main policies introduced affecting children under five, including longer maternity leave, Sure Start Children’s Centres, free early education for all three and four year olds, more affordable and higher quality childcare, and more generous financial support for families with children, both in and out of work. The paper draws on government statistics and evaluations as well as wider evidence from a range of independent sources to examine where increased spending went, and with what impact. Children’s outcomes improved on a range of measures during this period. Child poverty fell from one in three to one in four in households with a youngest child under five. Low birthweight and infant mortality rates (IMR) fell, and Foundation Stage Profile results improved. In all three measures gaps between different social groups narrowed. Research evaluations, where available, point to small but significant effects of particular policies, including Sure Start, the Neighbourhood Nurseries Initiative and the Graduate Leader Fund. However, in the absence of more widespread evidence from evaluations it is difficult to attribute changes in outcomes directly to changes in policy. The paper discusses these challenges and considers a series of ‘tests’ of Labour’s impact, including whether improvements represent a change in a longer-term trend, and, where possible, how outcomes compare in international terms.

This paper uses the Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes framework to evaluate the record of successive Conservative administrations on early childhood during the period between 2015 and the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic in February 2020. The paper covers services and benefits for families with children under five, with a focus on England. The paper analyses early childhood policies and goals during this period, the level and distribution of public spending on services and benefits, and their impact on inputs (such as staff qualifications), outputs (such as take-up of early education and childcare) and outcomes (such as gaps in early cognitive development). The paper points to a mixed record on policies for young children and their families: there was progress on improving childcare affordability, but little action on childcare quality, while Sure Start children’s centres continued to be squeezed and cash benefits were cut. Overall, spending on young children fell and became less progressive. By 2020 inequalities had widened in a range of early child outcomes, including child poverty, low birthweight and child obesity. This left early childhood – and inequalities within it in particular – in a precarious position on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The paper was written as part of a major research programme on trends in the distribution of social and economic outcomes in the UK and the design and impact of social policies. The paper seeks to map out the potential implications of Brexit for social policies and distributional outcomes in the UK. It explores the consequences of the referendum result itself while also looking ahead to the possible impact of the UK’s exit from the European Union. Future effects are considered under five main headings: the effects on the economy, with knock-on consequences for public services; withdrawal from European employment and human rights legislation; implications for EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU; implications of an end to free movement for public service delivery; and implications of gaining control over resources and regulations, such as those governing state aid. Given the continuing context of high uncertainty, the paper considers what different Brexit scenarios may mean, with a central focus on a scenario in which the UK leaves the single market.

The Government's strategy for improving social mobility emphasised the importance of early childhood. Against a backdrop of tightening austerity, what happened in practice to children's services, family incomes and early child development?

In November 2016, the UK government announced they would be lowering the benefit cap, the total amount a family with no-one in full-time employment can receive from the government in social security. This policy change reduced financial support for large (often lone parent) families and those with high housing costs, and broke the link between needs and entitlements in the British social security system. This policy was intended to incentivise people to return to work but it may have also harmed mental health, especially because those affected by the reform may struggle to find appropriate work or move to cheaper housing. We treat this reform as a natural policy experiment, comparing those at-risk of being capped and those who were not, and then examining the risk of experiencing poor mental health both before and after the cap was lowered. The main outcome is a binary measure of self-reported mental health problems. Drawing on data from 1.4 million individuals collected between January 2015 and December 2018, 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 to 3.88) compared with those at a low risk of being capped. This association is consistent to a variety of sensitivity tests. We conclude that lowering the total amount of financial assistance families can receive in 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.

Child poverty in the UK has seen rapid change over the last two decades, broadly falling from the late 1990s until 2012/13 and rising since then. As a result, child poverty rates converged with rates of poverty for workingage non-parents before diverging again. This paper examines these changes through the lens of family size, asking how horizontal inequalities have changed over this period between larger families – those with three or more children – and smaller families with one or two. Focusing on data from before the pandemic, we look at trends in poverty rates for the two groups and explore alternative explanatory factors – including changes in the composition of larger families, differential employment rates, and differences in the impact of social security support. Our interest in family size is two-fold. First, by interrogating the way families of different sizes have been affected by policy we gain a better understanding of the effects of particular approaches to poverty reduction, with implications for policy debates both in the UK and beyond. Second, larger families are rhetorically important in the popular discourse around benefit receipt, with stigmatising representations of ‘benefit broods’ mobilised by politicians and popular culture to critique a supposed culture of ‘welfare dependency’. This has provided justification for recent significant cuts in social welfare provision, including policies specifically targeting larger families – the benefit cap and the two-child limit. The paper seeks to illuminate the reality behind these popular conceptions by exploring larger families’ composition, employment and poverty rates, even before these policies take effect. We find that most of the rise and the fall in child poverty in the UK is a story about poverty in larger families. Social security changes are the key driver here: these policy shifts have affected larger families much more acutely than smaller families, simply because larger families have a grea

Child benefits are typically paid on a per-child basis, without restrictions on family size. In this paper we generate unique evidence on the effects of capping child benefits by family size by examining the introduction of the UK’s ‘two-child limit’, which restricts means-tested child benefits to just two children per family. The UK government justified this policy on grounds that it would incentivise employment among larger families. We use mixed methods – combining quasi-experimental quantitative techniques and qualitative longitudinal research – to investigate the policy’s employment effects. We find no evidence that capping child benefits increases employment. Labour market activity among larger families seem to be particularly ‘sticky’ in response to reductions in benefits income, likely due to parents’ commitment to unpaid care, the scale of caregiving responsibilities and barriers to paid work. Our qualitative evidence also indicates that the effects of negative income shocks can render such policies counter-productive by pushing people further away from the labour market.

There are long-standing disparities in child development between children from different backgrounds. Progress in narrowing gaps is slow and differences remain wide, especially by household income. This Nuffield Foundation-funded project examined three aspects of children’s experience of early education that have been relatively overlooked to date but might be contributing to persistent disparities. It looked at access to free early education places, at peer group composition in pre-school, and at children’s experience of onward transition to reception class.

This report examines the evidence on whether money in adulthood has a causal impact on wider adult outcomes. Individuals with less income tend to do worse on a range of indicators than those with more, including measures of physical health and subjective well-being. Would more money in itself make a difference? Or are these differences driven by other, associated factors (education, more satisfying work), or by long-term factors too well-established to shift with a boost to income during adulthood?

A core element of a welfare state is the support that is provided to families with children, in recognition of the additional needs that dependent children create. Variation in the design, generosity and implementation of this provision is significant, reflecting underpinning perspectives towards children, families, and the state’s role in supporting them. Recent work by Mary Daly developed a new typology of social policy towards children, differentiating between ‘childhood-oriented’, ‘child-oriented’ and ‘family-oriented’ policies. In this paper, we explore how far this typology enables us to classify recent significant changes to social security support for children within the UK, in particular the 2013 benefit cap and the 2017 two-child limit. We propose that an extension to Daly’s typology is needed to make sense of these changes. We develop a new category of ‘adult-behaviour-orientated’ child-contingent policy, encapsulating policies that are directed towards children but made conditional on the behaviour of the adults in their household. We go on to analyse support for children 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 across the continent of children being rendered invisible or semi-visible within social security systems that prioritise other goals than children’s needs. It is significant that 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.