Secure Futures for Children and Families will ask the question: What does a social security system that provides a secure future for children and families look like? This launch paper sets out where the social security system is now and what needs to change.
Living Hand to Mouth, by Rebecca O’Connell, Abigail Knight and Julia Brannen, brings the latest research on food poverty together with the voices of children and young people experiencing food poverty first hand.
Financial support to low income families to pay for childcare through working tax credits is being replaced by the childcare element of universal credit. This Early Warning System report examines the impact of this change on parents and childcare providers.
This report presents the findings of a small-scale, local study of the costs of education in secondary schools in Oxford, from the viewpoint of parents. The research was conducted by the Oxford and District Action on Child Poverty group, whose goals were: to assess the costs of education for children in secondary schools in Oxford; to find out how families perceived these costs and their impact, and if and how they managed to cover them; and to learn what schools had done to respond to the impact of these costs on families and the outcomes of their responses. The focus was on pupils in year 7 in secondary school.
This report presents case studies and analysis from CPAG’s Early Warning System to highlight problems with the information provided to people claiming universal credit.
CPAG's early warning system takes the temperature of how changes to benefits are affecting families by highlighting the most problematic issues which advisers around the country are seeing. The latest update reveals ongoing problems with people being wrongly directed to universal credit and people moving to universal credit and becoming significantly worse off, as well as a number of problems with specific elements of universal credit: housing costs, real time information, access to appeal rights, and failure to adequately meet support needs.
This report shows parents struggled more than ever to provide a decent standard of living for their families in 2013. This is the second in a series of annual reports on the cost of bringing up a child in the UK.