On 13 March, eight parents from across Britain came to Westminster for a meeting with the education secretary. All are parenting children with SEND while living on a low income, and shared their experiences and their calls for change with the education secretary, advisers and officials. Two more parents who could not be there in person had speeches read out on their behalf. This article brings together excerpts from these speeches.
What is the evidence on the impact of the benefit cap on children and families in poverty? In particular, how do high housing costs affect experiences of the cap and people's ability to escape it? And why is it so important that the government scraps the policy?
CPAG’s annual Cost of a Child report looks at how much it costs families to provide a minimum socially acceptable standard of living for their children. It is calculated using the Minimum Income Standard (MIS) research, carried out by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
CPAG’s annual Cost of a Child report looks at how much it costs families to provide a minimum socially acceptable standard of living for their children. It is calculated using the Minimum Income Standard (MIS) research, carried out by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
In 2023, the Mayor of London committed to providing free school meals to every primary aged child in state-funded schools in London. This is an evaluation of the roll-out of the policy, commissioned by Impact on Urban Health.
This short report looks at the challenges facing schools when implementing a means-tested school meal system, and the debt families are incurring for school meals in primary schools across England.
Child poverty has been rising across the UK over the past decade, driven by large cuts to the social security system. But some divergence in the numbers will arise between the four nations because of policy choices. What are the key differences in how child poverty is tackled in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? What can we learn from progress being made? And as the new UK government creates its child poverty strategy, what path should it take?
Before the UK general election in July 2024, the Conservative government cut national insurance (NI) contribution rates for employees and the self-employed (twice). More radically, it announced a longer-term intention to abolish these contributions entirely, leaving the future of NI benefits unclear. But this was against a backdrop of a chronic lack of well-informed debate about the NI system and social security generally in the UK. Fran Bennett tries to put this right.
