Applied Policy Exercise: Background
The issue of how governments might use social policy to help balance ‘work’ and ‘family life’ is rising up the political agenda in many countries as various social, economic and demographic trends have created new and sometimes growing pressures on our time. In particular, there is an increasingly strong debate about what might be done to better support working parents. Indeed, the phrase ‘support for hard working families’ has become a favourite piece of rhetoric of many politicians across the political spectrum and the current UK government have promised reforms to key aspects of parental support in order to improve a system that the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, has described as ‘Edwardian’.
Applied Policy Exercise: Applied Materials
This week, the core reading consists of a single source, which is a report by the think tank Demos. You should read pages 7-55 of the report, which we have linked to below:
- Wilkinson, H and Briscoe, I – Parental Leave: The Price of Family Values? London: Demos.
Note the source itself is dated in policy terms (it was published in the late 1990s) but we have chosen to use it here because it provides a strong overview of the key policy dilemmas faced in this field – highlighting well key conceptual issues that are pertinent in so doing – and it is the concepts and principles we want to focus on in the seminar debate. However, you might also find it useful to read the academic sources (below) that provide a more up-to-date perspective.