Over the last two hundred years, Britain has witnessed a dramatic shift in the level of concern and attention paid to the issue of child poverty. Child poverty is now high on the policy agenda and is broadly recognised as a problem for society and a fit subject for policy intervention. By setting the development of this policy agenda in historical perspective, this book aims to illuminate both the complex relationship between research and policy, and the way in which policy constructs its own objects of intervention. The role of research into child poverty has sometimes been perceived as being...

According to Poovey (1998), the end of the 18th century marked a shift in approaches to numbers and counting, whereby numbers became stripped of the Christian Platonic significance that had characterised that understanding hitherto. Instead they began to be regarded as without moral connotation and to hold the ability to support or challenge theoretical positions or presuppositions. For Poovey, it is Thomas Malthus who exemplifies this transition in approaches to argument and the collection of numerical data. She highlights Malthus’sAn essay on the principle of population(first published in a short version in 1798; the expanded edition, which is...

The development of a particular notion of childhood as a separate sphere was first explicitly explored in the work of Phillippe Ariès, first published in France in 1960 (Ariès, 1962); and Ariès’ unique contribution continues to be influential despite substantial criticism of some of his specific claims (for example Pollock, 1983; see also discussions in Lavalette and Cunningham, 2002; Heywood, 2001). Following Ariès’ critical intervention, Norbert Elias (1994) famously linked the separation of the child’s and adult’s spheres with the ‘civilising process’; and Lawrence Stone (1977), somewhat contentiously, charted changes in the nature of families and family roles. The historical...

The history of state education in Britain is not a story of the translation of unequivocal research into policy. Instead, it illustrates the way in which the apparently obvious connection of childhood and school, of the identification of the child with the schoolchild, was neither necessary nor self-evident. The introduction of state education was not a response to issues of child welfare; but it nevertheless produced the conditions under which child welfare could become a subject of investigation and a source of concern, leading to the need for social policy intervention.

The increasing regulation of child labour not only increased...

Malthus, in 1803, proposed in hisEssay on the principle of populationthat:

The clergyman of each parish should, previously to the solemnization of a marriage, read a short address to the parties, stating the strong obligation on every man to support his own children; the impropriety, and even immorality of marrying without a fair prospect of being able to do this; the evils which had resulted to the poor themselves, from the attempt which had been made to assist, by public institutions, in a duty which ought to be exclusively appropriated to parents. (Malthus, 1992 [1803], p 261)

The...

The beginning of the postwar period may have been marked by continued food rationing and an acute housing shortage, but it was also the start of an era in which all families with two or more children received a benefit recognising some of the costs of bringing up children, in which all state schooling was guaranteed to be free up to the age of 15, and in which many other services were also provided within schools to all pupils, either freely, such as the school medical service and milk, or not, such as school meals (although these were free to...

In his Toynbee Hall lecture, Tony Blair made it clear that children were a priority, that poor children were a particular source of concern, but that the state also had a commitment to all children:

Above all our welfare reform programme will give children – all children – the support they need. Our approach on children brings together all the lessons we have learned from applying reform in other areas…. The levels of child deprivation are frightening…. And in the last 20 years the tax burden on families has increased. At the very time that families have come under increasing pressure, juggling...