A report commissioned by the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) in Scotland from the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University has found a widening gap between the cost of raising a child in Scotland and actual family incomes, despite the significant impact of Scottish government policies and lower childcare costs.
At a time of sharply increasing costs and stretched family budgets, ensuring that children have all they need to take part in school is another worry for families. The guide will help schools consider how they’re already supporting families and how they can make small changes to policies, practices and communications to help families through times of economic difficulty.
Families in 2022 are facing the greatest threat to their living standards in living memory. Much has been written about these pressures, but to put them into context, we need to understand what has been happening to children’s and families’ costs in recent years. The Cost of a Child reports have been produced annually for a decade, and this 2022 edition presents the latest evidence of what families need as a minimum, and how this compares to the actual incomes of low-income families.
A briefing for the debate in the Scottish Parliament: Progress on the Automation and Take-up of Scottish Social Security Benefits, looking at the importance of data sharing for automation, and the importance of universalism for take-up.
Two hundred thousand more children will be pushed into poverty if benefits are uprated by wages rather than inflation, new analysis from Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) finds. Almost all these children will be in families where at least one parent is working.
A short Cost of the School Day briefing setting out what we’ve heard about school uniform from learners, families and their schools and what we think is important for stakeholders to bear in mind when responding to the current Scottish Government consultation on statutory national uniform policy guidance.
John Dickie's blog calls on the First Minister must use her Programme for Government to continue to do the right thing, and prioritise protecting children from the immediate cost of living crisis, at the same time as safeguarding the longer term progress needed to meet Scotland’s statutory child poverty targets.