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.
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.
This chapter is the first of three chapters which focus on research data based on interviews with staff working in schools and early years settings with food banks. The chapter explores how schools supply food to families, including where food comes from and how it is distributed to families. It is argued that schools use their knowledge of the local community to decide how food is given out, and the role of choice in affording families dignity. The ‘origin stories’ of the food banks are also explained, in order to consider in more depth why schools have decided to offer this provision. Central to this chapter is the concept of policy enactment which emphasises the importance of context. We discuss how context guides the operation of a school’s food bank, even though a policy is not being enacted in the strictest sense. Schools and early years settings can be vastly different, and this necessitates food bank provision on different scales and of different types.
The education sector has in recent years experienced significant challenges due to rising levels of need among communities, as families have struggled with poverty, including experiencing food insecurity during the cost-of-living crisis. This chapter outlines this context for the food banks in schools and early years projects by exploring existing research on the relationships between poverty and education, the impact of Covid and austerity, and how hunger affects learning and family stress. The literature on community food banks is also explored, including the key issues relevant to food banks in schools: the role of stigma, the social role of food and how food banks relate to the withdrawal of the state from responsibility for welfare.
This second chapter of findings explores the impact of having a food bank from the perspective of those who work in a school or early years setting. The impact is significant for many of the participants, but diverse, and goes far beyond an impact on children’s learning. This chapter explores how adults perceive the effect of families having regular access to free food on children’s learning, participation and motivation. The wider social impacts of receiving food and other goods, including how children are able to experience and enjoy ordinary childhood activities, are then examined. These are important in understanding the impact of food banks in schools, and can be seen as part of a school’s practices of inclusion. A third section of the chapter focuses on the impact of families, which is seen by teachers to be far more diverse than simply reducing hunger. School staff’s perceptions of families include some deficit discourses, and it is argued that these form part of a continued deserving/undeserving poor narrative that persists. This points to the complexity of food banks as a social practice, but it is argued that schools are well placed to understand and cater for these needs.
In this concluding chapter, the wider policy implications of food banks in schools are discussed. Returning to the central argument relating to the responsibilisation of schools to address the problem of child poverty, the chapter begins an exploration of staff views of food banks as a phenomenon. The impact on budgets and staff, and the lack of recognition for this work within accountability systems are also discussed. The lack of policy in this area for schools is a key point in this chapter. Tools from policy sociology relating to policy enactment are insufficient to understand this topic, and require some evolution to consider how schools act when faced with a policy vacuum. The issue of responsibility is then considered in more depth, as the focus shifts to whether the argument made in relation to public food banks and the withdrawal of the state applies to school food banks. This leads to an argument for a more nuanced understanding of how responsibilisation is operating within the neoliberal state. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how we might conceptualise educational responses to the cost-of-living crisis, and why this research matters in terms of how we view schools and welfare state.
This third chapter of research findings explores how leaders balance the advantages of operating a food bank with the additional costs, beginning with a discussion of the impact on home–school relationships. This includes discussion of how difficulties can arise in relationships. Justifications for the food banks are examined here, drawing on both moral and practical reasons. Schools offer a practical solution, in that parents attend the site regularly and there is reduced stigma. School leaders are pragmatic about their unique position as the service which sees children regularly, arguing that if they did not provide food, no one would. This chapter examines the ambiguity of feeling about stepping beyond education into welfare-related work, and the complexities of decision-making around what can and should be done by schools.
This book is about how growing levels of child poverty have resulted in schools and early years/early childhood settings stepping beyond their educational purpose to feed hungry families during the cost-of-living crisis. Schools, nurseries, nursery schools and pre-schools offer free food to families experiencing food insecurity through food banks which operate on-site, in various forms. This chapter sets out our rationale for the research, which relates to the cost-of-living crisis in the early 2020s, and some background on the primary and early years education sectors. The chapter then sets out the theoretical framework for our analysis, and discusses the key concepts of enactment and responsibilisation. The research design and methods are then outlined. A final part of the chapter sets out the structure of the remaining chapters.
Nurseries are for children, and ultimately their success must be judged by whether they are places where all children can thrive. Ideally a nursery should be able to offer supportive and stimulating environments for all children, whatever their circumstances. The chapter discusses the relevance of the theories of James Heckman, the Nobel prize-winning economist who argued that nurseries of any kind could be instrumental in changing outcomes for poor children. Unfortunately, despite recent government initiatives, prompted by Heckman’s theories, the poorest children, and those with special needs, are most likely to be excluded from private nurseries, although they do attend nursery education classes and schools. This chapter explores what happens to children with special needs whose parents are seeking a nursery place. It concludes that there is only a very weak conception of children’s rights informing government policies on nurseries, and young children do not get the justice to which they should be entitled.
England has a separate system, Ofsted (The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills), for inspecting and regulating nurseries, from the other constituent nations of the UK, and this system only collects English data, but the regulatory processes are roughly similar across the UK. However, the private sector does not differentiate between nations in the data it amasses but instead refers to UK trends. This chapter argues that Ofsted’s remit is woefully inadequate. This is partly a reflection of the so far irreconcilable divisions and standards of care and education, but also because Ofsted has made no allowances in its regulatory procedures for the private sector, which it does not even acknowledge as a category. Despite heavy levels of government subsidy to the private sector, Ofsted does not monitor anything to do with costs and fees and value for money, and has no remit to inspect the activities and financial arrangements of the growing offshore company sector. On a more minor level, there are conspicuous gaps in its monitoring of physical activity and environmental issues, which are discussed.
The UK performs poorly in international comparisons of childcare, despite government claims to the contrary. The most recent cross-national enquiry, in 2023, by the UNICEF Office of Research (Innocenti Centre), puts the UK 36th out of 41 rich countries. This chapter considers the methodologies that are used in cross-national enquiries, and the statistics that are available for comparison. The EU Eurydice datasets and OECD datasets are particularly useful for exploring the extensive range of issues within childcare, including income levels and ability to pay, as well as service standards and parental leave arrangements. The chapter highlights the inadequacy of the UK contribution to data collection, as well as the comparatively poor services.
