government and social policy

This is the report of an inspection carried out under the Children act 2004. The purpose of the inspection was to evaluate the contribution made by local services towards ensuring children and young people are properly safeguarded and to determine the quality of service provision for looked after children and care leavers.

The overall effectiveness of safeguarding services in Staffordshire was grade 3 (adequate). The effectiveness of services for looked after children and young people is adequate overall but with some good and outstanding features.

This report aims to demonstrate how poor mental health is a significant cause of wider social and health problems, including: low levels of educational achievement and work productivity; higher levels of physical disease and mortality; violence, relationship breakdown and poor community cohesion. In contrast, good mental health leads to better physical health, healthier lifestyles, improved productivity and educational attainment and lower levels of crime and violence.

This report focuses on the discrimination experienced by families living in poverty in the UK ('povertyism'), examining the barriers preventing them from enjoying equal access to fundamental economic and social rights. Current thinking, in the national and international poverty debate, is that the question of rights, and their absence, is linked to poverty. Povertyism perpetuates a lack of knowledge and understanding about the lives of people experiencing poverty. The resulting policy approach leads to a denial of their basic human rights.

This report published by the Beckley Foundation Drug Policy Programme in partnership with the International Centre for Prison Studies at Kings College London, revisits the topic of the incarceration of drug offenders [IDPC, UK].

Most governments make strong statements about the need to maintain, and often increase, police activity and penal sanctions for drug users. This approach, it was claimed, is based on the idea that strong enforcement, and widespread incarceration, will deter potential users and dealers from becoming involved in the illegal drug market.

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is the UK's leading research funding and training agency addressing economic and social concerns. They aim to provide high quality research on issues of importance to business, the public sector and government.

This research examines how human rights have been used internationally to shape new conceptions of poverty and new approaches to combating it, and assesses the lessons for the UK. People working to tackle poverty in the UK are increasingly interested in using human rights in their work. This study looks at how this has been done in other countries, its impact on affected communities, debate, policy and government programmes, and its relevance for the UK.

The number of children aged seven and under who are excluded from primary schools is very small but some children of this age are receiving fixed-period exclusions, occasionally leading to permanent exclusion. This study investigated the reasons for this and the ways some schools manage to avoid using exclusion. Sixty nine schools participated in a survey. Thirty schools had excluded several young children. Another 27 schools, each near to one of the first 30 schools, had not excluded any children in the same period. Twelve schools had only excluded one child, but on several occasions.

The government has high-profile child poverty targets which are assessed using a measure of income, as recorded in the Household Below Average Income series (HBAI).

However, income is an imperfect measure of living standards. Previous analysis suggests that some children in households with low income do not have commensurately low living standards.

This report aims to document the extent to which this is true, focusing on whether children in low-income households have different living standards depending on whether their parents are employed, self-employed, or workless.

This enabling guidance is intended to help primary care trust providers of community services to move their relationship with their commissioners to a purely contractual one and consider what type of organisations would best meet the future needs of patients and local communities, and how change can be managed to support the transformation of services to patients.

A large scale study was conducted to examine whether Local Safeguarding Children Boards (LSCBs) have successful in overcoming some of the weaknesses in Area Child Protection Committees. This interim report draws upon research undertaken over the first 12 months (January 2008 - January 2009) of the research study.