For a small number of parents home education is a preferred alternative to school and in England more parents are taking up this option. This has refuelled a long-running debate about the adequacy of a regulatory framework under which parents are not required to register their children as home educated and provision is not routinely monitored. This article highlights concerns regarding the ability of local authorities to fulfil their duty to safeguard these children, drawing on interviews with sixty-eight officials working in twenty local authorities, national surveys of local education and safeguarding agencies and interviews with thirty-eight staff working in twenty-five schools. We argue that, although the Government’s Department of Education is committed to introducing compulsory registration of home-educated children, more is needed to strengthen local authority powers and to address the reasons why some parents choose, or feel pressured, to take their children out of school.

In this thematic issue, the authors explore family policies in seven different countries: Hungary, Hong Kong, Lithuania, Romania, Taiwan, Turkey, and the UK. A common theme is that in analysing these policies, we need to take into account more than gender, but rather we need to also consider issues such as class, poverty, religion, and the use of migrant workers. Thus, these countries have all been moving away from the traditional male breadwinner model; however, the adult-worker model is also inadequate for describing the nuances of these countries’ policies. Instead, an intersectional approach makes more sense, combining gender with the other important socioeconomic issues just mentioned.

This article begins by discussing some of the main approaches that have emerged to gender and family policy, before proceeding to discuss more modern trends. It begins by discussing institutional approaches, such as the male-breadwinner model, defamilialisation, degenderisation. Then it discusses cultural approaches, such as the national ideals of care, gendered moral rationalities, and Hakim’s preference theory. Then this article continues by briefly discussing attempts to broaden the discussion by bringing in children (including through the capabilities approach) and by adding an intersectional perspective.

This article maps how inclusive discourses aimed at addressing systemic racism and anti-Black racism circulate and operate within youth social policy in Ontario, Canada. Numerous reports and programmes attempt to understand systemic racism and propose new approaches to youth work in addressing youth violence, underemployment, underachievement, etc. This article demonstrates how efforts to counter state violence and systemic racism are pulled into the economic and political framework of racial neoliberal and colonial standards. Employing a Foucauldian genealogy of policy discourses (1992-2019) and semi-structured interviews with youth sector members, it traces how anti-racism discourses are altered by a colonial aphasia (Stoler, 2016) that in turn supports circuits of Whiteness, which continue to target, measure, train, and surveil racialised youth, limiting alternative ways of being.

China adopted neoliberal approaches to improve the supply of quality social services in the early 2000s. How did the Chinese government manage the financial and quality risks of increasing the provision via government purchasing and how did it differ from other countries? The article examines the policy trajectory of early childhood education and care in China and Australia on this question. Policy analysis of the effect of purchasing on the cost to government and quality of services shows how both countries used subsidy arrangements to engage non-profit and private providers to expand supply. When faced with market risks, they both tightened regulations, but China differed in the speed and strength of their response, restricting the proportion of private providers. The findings have implications for understanding the risks of relying on market forces in other social service sectors, and how policy can effectively respond.

The following is a list of learning and research resources on topics that are central to this themed section, namely the male-breadwinner and adult worker models, and their alternatives; intersectionality; the views of employers and workplace culture; the role and influence of informal care; and the tendency toward dualisation.

This study aims to empirically understand the precarity of food delivery work at online platforms particularly during the COVID-19-led devastations. Food delivery workers are the new form of the global phenomenon in the labour market. This is a result of access to cheap internet and smartphones among customers, which has enabled the platform to create a new form of labour market. Platform-based food aggregators use the terminology of 'delivery partners’ for these workers which alters the traditional employer-employee relationships, allowing corporations to evade labour-related responsibilities. This makes working conditions at digital platforms highly precarious and is reflected by low income and the non-existence of labour welfare measures. The COVID-19 pandemic and resultant lockdowns have worsened the precarious nature of on-demand work. It has caused a massive loss of livelihoods and erosion of income, showing the importance of traditional employer-employee relationships. These precarious working conditions call for affirmative actions in the form of regulations.

COVID-19 triggers urgent questions about the social, political and ethical implications of care markets, practices and relations. This article presents analysis of the Houses of the Oireachtas Special Committee on Covid-19 Response exposing current discourses about care in Ireland. Utilising the Trace analysis method (Sevenhuijsen, 2004), grounded in feminist care ethics, reveals a state accountability exercise grappling with the failures of the care market and the inhumanity of congregated settings. Care discourses were constrained by a focus on the formal health system, normalisation of binary care giver and care receiver categorisations and a lack of recognition of gendered inequalities of care in homes and workplaces. Public discourse and feminist analysis revealed unreasonable labour conditions for women working in health and social care and a silencing of the voices of those with care needs. The article contributes to a reconceptualisation of care in post-pandemic futures and urges societal co-responsibility for ‘universal care’.

Both literature and public policy on work inclusion has shifted towards the demand-side, which recognises that employer engagement is crucial to increase labour market participation and sustained employment for vulnerable groups. Research shows, however, that the implemented demand-side policies have been less than effective. This opens a discussion about barriers to implementation in terms of relevant employer characteristics. By use of Norwegian register data, this article estimates the impact of employer size and extent of implemented disability policies on probability of sustaining employment for workers with reduced capacity, finding that employer size negatively impacts probability of sustaining employment. Extent of implemented disability policies positively impacts probability of sustaining employment, irrespective of employer size. I argue that systematically considering these characteristics can help identify how and where to improve the position of workers with reduced capacity and discuss the implications for public policy.

Established theories of social policy development, such as industrialisation and power resources, have been extensively used to explain the expansion of social policy, predominantly in developed economies. We argue that they may not always be applicable in the Global South. Our article examines multiple factors at play in Indonesia’s healthcare policy expansion using qualitative content analysis of historical sources, literature, and nine interviews with key policy architects. Using the pull-and-push factor model, we examined the interactions between policy entrepreneurs and centre-right political parties in creating national healthcare policy architecture and expansion. Our findings confirm that the window of opportunity for expansion was augmented when the political party of the ruling government experienced a decline in public trust, while clientelistic motives among elites facilitated the reform process. Drawing the lesson from Indonesia, we contend push prevails over the pull factors (labour movement and cross-class alliances) in social policy development.

Family and community care work – mentoring, feeding, and nurturing – is a critical activity in any society. It is, and it enables, productive and reproductive acts that hold society together and enable economies to function. Its importance is magnified for people with low income in that their economic options, outside the home, are more limited than for people with higher incomes. We conducted a year-long financial diaries project with twenty-eight mainly low-income Canadians and found that care work was critically important for them and their families and communities. However, we found that this work was often stigmatised: it is not well paid (if at all;, it involves costs to the provider; and it can lead people to become dependent on predatory loans. We argue that Canadian social policy must broaden its conception of care work and expand support for persons, particularly women, who have older children, and community commitments.

The study is aimed at exploring the influencing factor of wages among social service workers (SSWs) through a cross-country analysis. Using Luxembourg Income Study data, two aspects are emphasised: first, the trends and patterns of wage levels among SSWs. Second, the determining factors that influence their low wages at a cross-national level and how those factors are intersectionally intertwined to exacerbate the wage level. Three significant findings are confirmed: a universal gendered wage gap; a more significant wage gap for those on part-time and/or fractured contracts and employed in the private sector; and a substantial association between a higher education and higher wages. Two policy concerns are raised for discussion: first, tackling the gendered wage gap and ensuring more secure employment, and a guaranteed living wage for those employed in the private sector. Second, enhancing the professionalism for empowering their effective choices in the labour market is essential.

This Social Policy and Society themed section examines a number of key social policy challenges in relation to the role that taxation measures and choices play, or can play, in shaping responses to them. Although the role of taxation is frequently recognised in assessments of these issues, it remains under-explored within social policy scholarship. The themed section offers an opportunity to explore the relevance of taxation policy design and choices to these challenges and contribute to the ongoing social policy debate on these issues.

In the Netherlands, the generic work-first support seems unable to mitigate the scarring effects of prior unemployment on ethnic minorities’ careers. This study compares the impact of vulnerable ethnic minorities participating in an alternative employer-based employment programme with a control group entitled to work-first support on employment up to ten years later. We look at how both labour market interventions with different time horizon strategies may close the employment gap with the regular labour force. Results indicate that programme participants from (non-)western groups achieve higher levels of (competitive) employment than the control group, but the programme’s impact is negligible for the most established ethnic groups. The improved short-term wage match can partially explain the additional programme effect when considering the different time horizon strategies. Our results call for more employer-based programmes providing vulnerable ethnic minorities with the desired skills for better employment prospects, e.g. skill-shortage jobs.

This article problematises two concepts frequently used in debates about resource allocation.

The term ‘system’ evokes a ‘unified whole’ and emphasises interaction among the different component parts within the system. However, the notion of a tax system insulated from the world around it obstructs an analysis of the ways in which interactions of tax arrangements with other elements of society shape distributional outcomes. The article argues that tax arrangements need to be understood as an open system.

Next, the article problematises the concept of ‘redistribution’ by examining the limitations of current approaches to redistribution. First, pre-distribution, referring to decisions about tax expenditures, is often overlooked, although it reflects allocation decisions that not only benefit recipients but also result in foregone revenues that might have been used for redistribution. Second, analyses of redistribution often focus exclusively on income. Third, taxes shape the kind of society we have in ways that limit future possibilities of redistribution. The article proposes the concept of structural redistribution to denote redistribution, which goes beyond redistribution among groups to change the nature of society.

This themed section explores linguistic disadvantage as a key form of structural-institutional disadvantage in welfare societies, focusing on how language policies, practices, and ideologies shape migrant background service users’ access to services, rights, and social protection. The novel contribution by the team of authors with a background in social policy, social work, sociology, and ethnology is to fill existing conceptual and empirical gaps by advancing a relational view on multilingualism and linguistic diversity and highlighting the critical importance of language in institutional policies and practices and in the everyday encounters and relationships between service users, the welfare state and its representatives. The articles represent a rich variety of national and cross-national research, drawing on empirical case studies from Finland, Sweden, Belgium, and Canada. By situating language practices within broader social, political, and cultural struggles, the section calls for social policies and practices that challenge monolingual ideals and promote plurilingual ways of knowing.

Discussions about economic equality have, in recent years, extended beyond considerations of income distribution to encompass the distribution of wealth and its intergenerational transfer. Driven by new and more frequent data, a better understanding is emerging of the concentration of wealth within society and the dynamics of its transfer between generations.

This article contributes to that discussion by assessing the economic and social rationales for the taxation of intergenerational wealth transfers. It outlines the social policy case for inheritances taxes grounded in vertical equity principles. Then it presents comparative data on household wealth across high-income European countries before focusing on one of these, Ireland, to consider whether current inheritance taxation policies counter or perpetuate these inequalities. Focusing on that system, the article explores a range of inheritance taxation reforms intended to address wealth inequality while providing recurring funds for public services and redistribution.

Social policy has not systematically addressed linguistic disadvantage and its enactment through welfare policies and practices. In this state-of-the-art article, we review literature on linguistic disadvantage in various fields, highlighting its dialogue with broader social policy research on inclusive and exclusive tendencies within welfare policies and practices. We distinguish between three thematically separate, yet intertwined, perspectives that we find important for future research: (1) language policy, linguistic disadvantage, and social (in)justice; (2) language ideologies and current nativist ideologies and discourses; and (3) the influence of (1) and (2) on the enactment of welfare policies at the street-level. We argue that more direct focus on issues of language and linguistic disadvantage is needed in social policy research. Particularly, it would benefit from a stronger conceptualisation that recognises how language policies and ideologies surface in minority language speakers’ relational encounters with the street-level welfare state, leading to linguistic disadvantage and discrimination.

The pursuit of measures to enhance the environmental sustainability of societies has shifted to become a core aspect of contemporary public policy. Taxation measures, intended to alter the behaviour of individuals and households, have become a central plank of many nations’ policy response. However, these initiatives arise alongside other taxation and redistributive policy objectives focused on equity.

The purpose of this article is to explore the taxation policy design challenges raised by attempts to pursue simultaneously environmental goals and traditional social policy objectives regarding social justice in line with sustainable development principles. Focusing on the experience of two liberal political economies with broadly similar tax structures but whose approach to carbon taxation has varied, Ireland and the UK, the article develops a social policy framework, inspired by the energy justice literature, to facilitate a holistic delineation of the social implications of carbon taxation in the two countries.

The article studies how public policies of migrant ‘integration’ are enacted and made sense of in the street-level welfare state from the perspective of social work practitioners performing integration work and with a focus on language and language skills acquisition. It draws from twenty-seven semi-structured individual interviews and reflective discussions after service user meetings with eleven social workers and social advisors in migrant integration services conducted between 2018 and 2019 in the Helsinki capital region of Finland. Results infer ambiguous, yet persistent, ideals of monolingualism in which Finnish language skills acquisition plays a central role and linguistic diversity turns into individual lack of skills and capacities through service user responsibilisation. Yet practitioners refer to the unfeasible situations this creates for service users as well as to their own struggles as practitioners within the monolingual service system.