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
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 216 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Policy Press x
- Social Policy x
Educational opportunities for disabled children remain a vital contemporary issue in British social policy. This new edition of the milestone book Education, Disability and Social Policy outlines critical debates in education concerning the position and experiences of disabled children and young people within a contemporary policy context.
Incorporating new voices from leading thinkers, this second edition includes a fresh introduction and updates to key chapters, including considerations of the impact of social media on young people’s ‘voice’ and whether the Children and Families Act (2014) resolved tensions between parents and local authorities over resources. In addition, it includes a new discussion on the intersection of race and disability.
This book traces the origins of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in the broader context of universalism since the beginning of the 20th century.
UHC aims to improve access to essential health services, provide financial protection and overcome health care inequities.
Drawing on rich first-hand data, including expert interviews and archival research, this book adopts a historical-sociological methodology to analyse some of UHC’s key political dynamics: consensus, conflicts, negotiations and struggles. It reveals that UHC is the result of a unique conjoining of movements in health, debates on human rights and concerns with development in a particular world context across the global North and global South.
Social housing continues to decline as existing tenanted homes are sold to their occupiers and run-down council estates are demolished. Demonstrating the value of the ‘Housing Plus’ approach –investment beyond “bricks and mortar” – this book outlines the role social landlords can play in tackling community problems. By investing in estate renewal, helping to house the vulnerable, offering a wide range of tenures and encouraging community housing, this approach builds links between housing design and a wider social value agenda.
With the voices of tenants and frontline staff at the forefront, Anne Power demonstrates how policy and practice can shift the bias against social housing in favour of its re-expansion.
How do we conceive of policy and political studies? To what extent should our science be ‘normative’ or ‘objective’ or ‘positive’? Who are our audiences and how do we engage them? Whose knowledge matters and how does it accumulate? How should we advance the study of policy and politics?
First published as a special issue of Policy & Politics, this book makes a statement about the study of policy and politics: what it is, how it is done, where it has been and where it is going. It comprises scholarship that has rarely been combined to explore several fundamental challenges about research in policy and politics. It concludes by challenging the field to consider different ways of thinking about what we can discover and construct in the world and how we can conduct our science.
Our knowledge and awareness of mental health has never been greater, but little progress has been made in addressing a key cause of poor mental health: poverty and financial insecurity.
This book argues that tackling poverty and financial insecurity through well-designed social security systems could offer a new focus for improving our collective mental health.
Focusing on three key areas: prevention, support and investment, it sets out how social security could act as a public mental health intervention with the potential to help stop our current crisis trajectory of worsening poverty and mental health.
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.
Fiscal welfare (or social tax expenditures) is a policy instrument associated with Liberal welfare states that has been on the rise across many European welfare states.
This book sheds light on the use and effects of fiscal welfare in France and Sweden. Focusing on the introduction of a 50% tax deduction on domiciliary care and household services, it explores the politics behind this scheme, its effects on care provision as well as on labour market dualisation, highlighting how fiscal welfare contributes to structuring both a social division of welfare and a social division of labour.
This ground-breaking book opens a new field of research by exploring fiscal welfare, the political uses of this policy instrument, the patterns of inequalities it gives rise to and its policy feedback effects.
Addressing a neglected area in academic research, media coverage and public understanding, this book takes a critical political economy approach to understanding food insecurity in Canada and the UK.
It examines how current economic and political systems create food insecurity and why food charity does little to address the problem, diverting the attention of policy makers, the media and the public from the sources of food insecurity.
This book provides a vision of a future whereby public control over the distribution of resources – including food – will eliminate food insecurity and other conditions that threaten health.
Despite the pivotal role played by parents in the child protection process, little attention has been paid to how social workers perceive them. Exploring representations of parents within Children’s Services, at the levels of policy, organisation and frontline practice, this book uses the concept of citizenship to construct a typology with ten variants of parent-citizenship. The typology reveals the complexities of parental representations and their relationship to the content of policy, organisational environments and dominant societal themes, as it uncovers how social workers use their discretion to influence representations of parents in practice.
The book is a resource that can be used by students, practitioners, researchers and parents advocacy organisations to evaluate policy and practice and to contribute to the search for the best possible outcomes for families. Arguing that parental participation in the child protection process is essential, the book increases the visibility of parents and contributes to a much-needed dialogue about their position and the expectations of them in Children’s Services.
This book is a manifesto for change that showcases new policy ideas for the next government.
Organised by the Society of Labour Lawyers, the Labour Party’s legal think tank, the contributors inspire debate about Britain’s future, exploring a wide range of issues from access to justice to family law reform, housing, employment, EU and trade law, asylum and refugee law, immigration and citizenship, international law and constitutional reform.
As Britain may see a change in government, this book is a must-have collection of new insights into how a Labour government can renew Britain.
