Are Women-Targeted Programs Women-Positive?

The authors distinguish between women-targeted and women-positive programs, citing examples of unsuccessful education programs in South Africa that were targeted at women. They question the educational and political aims of these initiatives and suggest that women-positive programs foreground gender within a broader context of transformation involving both men and women

Experiences of learning through collaborative evaluation from a masters programme in professional education

This paper presents findings from a collaborative evaluation project within a masters programme in professional education. The project aimed to increase knowledge of research methodologies and methods through authentic learning where participants worked in partnership with the tutor to evaluate the module which they were studying. The project processes, areas of the course evaluated and the data collection methods are outlined. The findings focus on key themes from evaluating the effectiveness of using a collaborative evaluation approach, including: enhanced student engagement; creativity of the collaborative evaluation approach; equality between the tutor and students; and enhanced research skills. Discussion focuses on the outcomes and effectiveness of the project and tutor reflections on adopting a collaborative approach. This paper highlights lessons from the project relevant to those interested in staff-student partnership approaches and those facilitating postgraduate learning and teaching programmes and educational research courses

Public attitudes towards social mobility and in-work poverty

New light is shed on what the public thinks about fairness in Britain by polling carried out on behalf of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.Key findings include:• 65 per cent of the public thought ‘who you know’ matters more than ‘what you know’;• Three in four people said family background has significant influence on life chances in Britain today. When asked about the extent to which their own parents’ income or level of education had influenced where they had got to in life, people were less clear. Four in 10 thought that their parents’ income and education had influenced them and four in 10 thought it had not;• Seven in 10 people thought a good education was the key to getting a good job but fewer people in Scotland (63 per cent) and Wales (59 per cent) believe that than in England (72 per cent). Across the UK nearly half of respondents think a good education remains out of the reach for most children from lower income families;• When asked where government should be focusing its efforts to improve social mobility, the most commonly selected policies related to employment especially creating jobs and apprenticeships or helping unemployed young people to find work;• Three in four thought that government should top up the incomes of the working poor while more than four in five (84 per cent) said that employers should be paying wages that better reflect the cost of living.<br/

Social mobility: the next steps

The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission was formally tasked by Ministers to give its view on what further steps the UK government could reasonably take to improve social mobility.The Commission advised opportunities for low paid workers to move up the career ladder, for young people to move from school to employment, and for disadvantaged youngsters to get support in their earliest years should be Ministers’ top priorities if they are to make headway on tackling the UK’s stagnating levels of social mobility.The recommendations of the report include that the UK government should:• Tackle the prevalence of low pay by changing the law to require listed firms and public sector employers to publish the number of staff earning low pay, and get the Low Pay Commission to set voluntary benchmarks for different sectors. The Commission believes this will help address the current situation where over half of working age adults in poverty and two thirds of children in poverty are in households where at least one adult works.• Consider ways to address the income gradient in children’s outcomes, such as stretching the pupil premium into nurseries and targeted antenatal classes that focus on how to help all parents know the basics of child development. The Commission believes that simple messages about the importance of parenting could start to narrow the stark gap in outcomes, for example just 4 in ten (42%) of the poorest children are read to every day compared to almost eight in ten (79%) of children from the richest families.• Assess what is happening to careers advice in schools and be prepared to strengthen obligations given widespread concerns that there is a problem. Only one in 20 businesses (5%) across the UK feels careers advice is good enough, while nearly three quarters (72%) think that advice needs to improve.The Chair of the Commission, the Rt Hon Alan Milburn said: There are a lot of government initiatives underway that could make a difference to social mobility. But there are obvious gaps in the government’s policy agenda that need to be closed. We welcome the opportunity to make recommendations about how that can be achieved. We identify early years, youth transition and wage progression as absolutely critical for life chances but too often they fall between the cracks in the responsibilities of different departments and agencies. We now look to government to take action. Next month the Commission will issue our first annual report on what progress is being made overall by government, employers and schools to put social mobility higher up all of their agendas.<br/

State of the Nation 2013: social mobility and child poverty in Great Britain

The legally-binding goal of ending child poverty by 2020 is likely to be missed by a considerable margin, and progress on social mobility may be undermined by the twin problems of high youth unemployment and falling living standards. So finds the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission in its first State of the Nation Annual Report.The Commission is a statutory body set up to monitor the progress of government and others in tackling child poverty and improving social mobility. Over the last 9 months, we have looked carefully at evidence on living standards and life chances in Britain.We believe the UK Government deserves credit for sticking to commitments to end child poverty by 2020 and for adding a new one of making social mobility the principal aim of its social policy. But while we see considerable efforts and a raft of initiatives to make Britain a fairer place, we do not believe the scale and effort is enough for progress to be likely. In particular:• since 2010 children in workless households have fallen 15% but recently there has been a 275,000 rise in the numbers of poor children in absolute poverty. Projections by the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggest that targets on poverty will be missed by 2 million children;• there are more people in work than ever before but the numbers of young people unemployed for two years or more are at a twenty-year high and Government has been too slow to act;• real median weekly earnings are now lower than they have been for more than a decade, putting many more families under pressureEntrenched poverty remains a priority for action but transient poverty, growing insecurity and stalling mobility are far more widespread than politicians, employers and educators have so far recognised. More low and middle-income families are being squeezed between falling earnings and rising house prices, university fees and youth unemployment. Many parents fear that when their children grow up they will have lower living standards than they have had.The nature of poverty has changed. Today child poverty is overwhelmingly a problem facing working families, not the workless or the work-shy. Two-thirds of Britain’s poor children are now in households where an adult works. In three-quarters of those households someone already works full-time. The problem is that those working parents simply do not earn enough to escape poverty.We argue that the missing piece of the policy agenda is a comprehensive approach to tackling in-work poverty. Today the UK has one of the highest rates of low pay in the developed world. The 5 million workers, mainly women, who earn less than the Living Wage desperately need a new deal. The taxpayer alone can no longer afford to shoulder the burden of bridging the gap between earnings and the cost of living. We call for a new settlement in which Government will need to devise new ways of sharing the burden with employers. This includes making commitments to:• end long-term youth unemployment by increasing high quality learning and earning opportunities for young people who should be expected to take up those opportunities or face tougher benefit conditionality;• reduce in-work poverty by raising the minimum wage, incentivising Jobcentre Plus and paying Work Programme providers for the earnings people receive not just for getting people into work and reallocating Budget 2013 childcare funding from higher rate taxpayers to help those on Universal Credit meet more of their childcare costs;• better resource careers services, provide extra incentives for teachers who teach in the worst schools and provide more help for low-attainers from average income families as well as low-income children to succeed in making it to the top, not just get off the bottom.We call on employers more actively to step up to the plate. They will need to provide higher minimum levels of pay and better career prospects in a way that is consistent with growing levels of employment. Half of all firms should offer apprenticeships and work experience. And unpaid internships should be ended in the professions.Citizens should seize the opportunities on offer. The key influencers on children’s life chances are not schools or governments. They are parents. So we urge Government to break one of the great taboos of public policy by doing far more to help parents to parent.A far bigger national effort will be needed if progress is to be made on reducing poverty and improving mobility. That will require leadership at every level. Government cannot do it alone.Chair of the Commission Rt. Hon. Alan Milburn said:It is part of Britain’s DNA that everyone should have a fair chance in life. Yet compared to many other developed nations we have high levels of child poverty and low levels of social mobility. Over decades we have become a wealthier society but we have struggled to become a fairer one. Just as the UK government has focused on reducing the country’s financial deficit it now needs to redouble its efforts to reduce our country’s fairness deficit. If Britain is to avoid being a country where all too often birth determines fate we have to do far more to create more of a level playing field of opportunity. That has to become core business for our nation

Response to "Measuring Child Poverty: a consultation on better measures of child poverty"

This is the Commission’s first piece of advice to Ministers and follows a formal request to respond to the child poverty measurement consultation.Evidence was gathered to inform the Commission’s response from a combination of desk research, meetings and roundtable sessions with academics, charities and other experts, and three focus groups with children and young people. The Commission also spoke with officials in the Scottish government, the Northern Ireland Executive and the Welsh government.The Commission welcomes the government’s commitment to ending child poverty. We agree with the government that “income is a key part of child poverty and who it affects” and that household income must be central to any measure of child poverty. We also agree that poverty is about more than just income. It is important that the framework through which we understand poverty both captures the central place of income and its wider multidimensional nature. Getting the measure right is important not only to allow what is happening to poverty to be accurately tracked: how we measure poverty drives the nature of the public policy effort to eradicate it