Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
During the cost-of-living crisis, schools and nurseries have had to step beyond their educational purpose to offer free food to families through food banks. This book explores how these food banks operate, why families use them and how they affect children’s participation and wellbeing. Drawing on case studies of 12 primary schools and early years settings across England, it examines the impact on family wellbeing, home-school relationships and staff.
The authors argue that the situation will remain unsustainable if this welfare work continues to be unfunded and unrecognised, raising a significant question of who should and who can be responsible for alleviating child poverty.
Money was already tight for UK families living on a low income before the COVID-19 pandemic, but national lockdowns made life much harder.
Telling the stories of these families, this book exposes the ways that pre-existing inequalities, insecurities and hardships were amplified during the pandemic for families who were already in poverty before COVID-19, as well as those pushed into poverty by the economic fallout it created.
Drawing on the Covid Realities research programme, and developed in partnership with parents and carers, it explores experiences of home-schooling, social security receipt and government, community and charitable support. This book sets out all that is wrong with the status quo, while also offering a powerful agenda for change.
Also see ‘COVID-19 Collaborations: Researching Poverty and Low-Income Family Life during the Pandemic’ (Open Access) to find out more about the challenges of carrying out research during COVID-19.
Child poverty is rising across affluent Western societies; how it is measured is vital to how governments act to prevent, alleviate or eliminate it. While the roots of childhood poverty are fiercely debated and contested, they are all too often misrepresented in policy and media discourses.
Seeking to redress this problem, Treanor places children’s experiences, needs and concerns at the centre of this critical examination of the contemporary policies and political discourses surrounding poverty in childhood. She examines a broad range of structural, institutional and ideological factors common across developed nations, and their impacts, to interrogate how poverty in childhood is conceptualised and operationalised in policy and to forge a radical pathway for an alternative future.
