Student absenteeism has worsened since the COVID-19 pandemic, both internationally and in New Zealand. Using the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI), a platform of linked, de-identified government data, we examined housing tenure trajectories for students aged 5–17 from 2013 to 2022. Students were grouped into three categories based on tenure trajectories: stable, unstable and highly unstable. Students with unstable tenure trajectories had significantly higher rates of unjustified absence and truancy than those with stable tenure trajectories, with the highest rates among those with highly unstable trajectories. These associations held in multivariate negative binomial models and after propensity score matching. The associations were stronger for primary school students, who are developmentally more vulnerable and dependent. We also found that Māori and Pacific students are disproportionately disadvantaged across both housing and education. By distinguishing different types of tenure trajectories, our study provides evidence that tenure trajectories contribute to absenteeism and provides new insights into a mixed body of literature.

In 2025, India’s Mid-day Meal Scheme (MDMS), the world’s largest school feeding programme, completed its third decade. This paper examines how families facing socio-economic hardship perceive and engage with a programme designed to meet children’s nutritional and educational needs. We analyse primary semi-structured interview data with multiple members of sixty households (246 participants) in two Indian states (Uttar Pradesh and Goa), conducted between 12/2022–03/2023. Our findings reveal that perceptions about the MDMS are driven less by its nutritional benefits and more by how it aligns with families’ aspirations and material realities, particularly their educational and income goals. We foreground parental perspectives as a critical but overlooked dimension in school meal research, positioning parents as central in shaping the programme’s reception and effectiveness. Faced with exceedingly constrained choices, families navigate complex trade-offs between competing priorities, such as collective versus individual well-being, resource allocation between education and food, and children’s time in school versus labour.

Childhood obesity rates are rising sharply worldwide, creating urgent questions: does the public support government involvement? And do people see obesity as a structural or individual problem? These questions matter for the legitimacy and effectiveness of public policy. Research on comparative public attitudes remains limited. This study addresses that gap. We analyse representative survey data from forty Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, including 39,746 respondents. Childhood obesity carries serious consequences for health, education, employment and life expectancy. Parental choices shape children’s diets and activity levels, yet government involvement remains contested, balancing policy goals against personal freedom. At the structural level, a powerful food industry drives rising obesity rates. An experimental vignette design tests the causal effect of the level of risk to a child on public support for government involvement. We also examine links between support, trust and political values and how childhood obesity is framed. A clear majority supports government involvement, consistent with child rights regulations. The level of risk to a child causally increases support. Trust and preferences for values of care and order correlate positively with support. Most respondents frame obesity as a health issue. Few identify it as a structural issue; a finding with significant implications for policy effectiveness.

This study examined the factors influencing the process underlying the implementation of social impact bonds (SIBs). While early research primarily emphasised the technical challenges, limited recent research has suggested that political and historical factors also influence a region’s SIB development. This paper augments the SIB literature by documenting an empirical case of SIB development in Hong Kong. Using the advocacy coalition framework, we uncovered that SIB’s development involved tension and contestation between two competing coalitions driving the discourse and how discreet coordination among the dominant coalition opposing the SIB agenda helped constrain the development. The findings underscore that a region’s SIB development likely involves power dynamics between opposing actors favouring and resisting the idea. The conceptual fluidity of SIBs enables actors to narrate what SIBs per se represent and to pursue their own coalition’s agendas.

This paper examines how senior executives at the UK’s largest publicly listed companies financially benefited from the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), and seeks to explain this phenomenon with the concept of elite welfare. Using a difference-in-differences research design, we analyse the impact of participation in the CJRS on executive remuneration between 2019 and 2023. Drawing on a sample of Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 350 firms (n = 246), we find that receipt of furlough support in 2020 was associated with significant increases in chief executive officer (CEO) performance pay and total remuneration in the immediate post-pandemic year. We interpret these results through a new analytical approach that understands elite income derived from rent-extraction facilitated by public policy or expenditure as a form of welfare. Unlike conventional welfare, which typically comprises relatively modest payments and concessions to broad sections of the population, elite welfare accrues to a small minority in privileged positions, taking the form of extractions of rent arising through opportunities created by government policy. We argue that recognising elite welfare as a parallel welfare system – largely insulated from competitive constraint and market discipline – provides a valuable new perspective on the interdependencies between inequality, public policy and the redistributive logics of the modern state.

Despite the expansion of non-contributory cash transfer programmes in Latin America – especially during the COVID-19 pandemic – public support for a universal basic income (UBI) remains remarkably low. Using original survey data from seven countries, we find that fewer than 10 per cent of respondents support both the universality and unconditionality that define UBI. Notably, support for UBI is not significantly shaped by socio-economic status or left-right orientation, and current recipients of targeted transfers are no more likely than others to favour UBI. In contrast, support for targeted programmes – particularly for the extreme poor – is robust and explained by income, education and ideology, consistent with classic self-interest models. These findings challenge the view that targeted programmes may serve as stepping stones toward universalist policies. Rather, they suggest that such programmes may consolidate a political logic of deservingness that constrains broader redistributive ambitions.

One mechanism driving persistent inequalities in childcare provision, despite rising investments and a substantial expansion of childcare facilities, may consist in the locational choices of providers, who eschew poorer neighbourhoods. Our analysis is the first to combine georeferenced data on child daycare centres with socio-demographic information from fifty-two German cities and 2,607 neighbourhoods to test this proposition. The study explores the correlation between local access to daycare centres and the proportion of social benefit recipients in the respective neighbourhoods. Our results indicate that neighbourhoods with greater socio-demographic difficulties in German cities have fewer daycare centres. This is exclusively due to the expansion of (publicly subsidised) daycare centres run by non-profit providers in neighbourhoods that are socio-economically better off. While the subsidiary principle in German social law explains the pivotal role of non-profit providers, municipalities should compensate for unequal childcare provision; however, such compensatory provision remains weak. Overall, the unequal spatial provision may contribute to the socially stratified utilisation of childcare in Germany, despite extensive public funding.

Being financially prepared for later life can make the difference between living in poverty and not. Existing research in the UK has evidenced gaps in pension protection between working-age individuals from different minority ethnic communities; however, research that examines how ethnicity interacts, specifically with gender and other demographic, health and socio-economic characteristics to affect pension membership, is lacking. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study between 2009 and 2023, this paper first examines patterns of continuity and change in pension membership among working-age individuals from minority ethnic groups. Focusing on the most recent wave, the analysis then assesses the importance of ethnicity and gender, alongside other demographic, health, socio-economic and subjective wellbeing factors in explaining individuals’ private pension participation and non-pension savings/investments. The findings show persistent ethnic and gender gaps, with Bangladeshi and Pakistani individuals faring worse than other ethnic groups, and women within such groups faring the worst. Factors indicating better socio-economic and subjective financial situation are associated with a greater likelihood of having a personal pension or expecting to use savings/investments in retirement. The paper critically discusses how current policies address the ethnic gaps in pension membership, and how such gaps can be addressed more effectively in the future.

In the face of ongoing welfare challenges, a wave of academic and policy thinking has advocated for recentring public policy around the principles and practices of relational welfare. The present paper argues that the potential of relational welfare can be further supported by sharper analytical understanding of its diverse potential forms and their varying key relational characteristics. To explore these priorities, the paper draws on sixty-one semi-structured interviews with thirty-six staff and twenty-five participants from sixteen UK Supported Employment services cast in a relational welfare mould. These grounded lived experiences highlight individuals’ universally positive experiences of these relational interventions, in contrast to past typical activation experiences, and the importance of a subset of Cottam’s relational welfare identifiers to those experiences. Rather than being homogeneous in their qualitative characteristics and requirements, the findings suggest legitimate variation in – and a hierarchical nesting of – relational welfare characteristics across more and less formalised relational interventions. Findings help to further critical understanding of relational welfare interventions and to support scholars and policy makers alike to maximise the reach, purity and potential of relational welfare approaches across diverse policy domains and approaches.

The tension between universalism and local autonomy is particularly pronounced in the Nordic welfare states. Decentralisation enables tailoring services to local needs and preferences but can also give rise to local disparities. Using Norway as a case, this study examines local variation and social inequalities in the allocation of decentralised care services to families of disabled children. The study is based on administrative register data on children with disabilities born between 2008 and 2019, identified by selected diagnoses or receipt of the attendance benefit (n = 21,163). The results show that a non-trivial share of the total variation in service allocation lies between municipalities. Part of this variation was due to differences in care needs, but local conditions such as municipality size also matter, suggesting inequalities in access to services by place of residence. While the municipal variation did not reflect differences in the distribution of families’ socioeconomic status and immigration background, these characteristics were associated with allocation at the individual level.

Renters and homeowners not only experience different levels of housing precarity, but the very nature of their precariousness is also different. This article advances our measurement of precarious housing, with a focus on its differential impacts across tenure types in Ireland. Using EU-SILC data (2008–2016), we investigate the prevalence and depth of housing precarity and the drivers of precarious housing. This period is of particular relevance as policymakers focussed on protecting homeowners from the fallout of the property crash, while neglecting the experiences of renters. We show that both private and social renters experience a higher level of precariousness. Furthermore, the tenure effect is more pronounced than the global financial crisis itself. Relevant for social policy interventions is our finding that low consumer debt shields households from experiencing housing precarity and suggests public debt advice services are crucial in mitigating these impacts. Overall, we discuss how housing precarity interacts with other social risks and demonstrate how the experience of precarious housing shifts class boundaries towards the squeezed middle and widens the gulf between renters and owners. These findings have political and policy implications for similar liberal housing regimes experiencing declining homeownership, an expansionary rental sector and widening housing wealth disparities.

International policy efforts to systematise the consideration of health outcomes across social and economic policy – the ‘Health in All Policies’ (HiAP) approach – have faced practical, relational and political difficulties. Meanwhile, new economic policy agendas focused on ‘inclusive growth’ or ‘wellbeing’ may provide an alternative route to improving population health by acting on upstream determinants. This research uses a frame analysis of thirty social, economic and health policy documents, and semi-structured interviews with thirty-four policy actors, to explore conceptualisations of ‘health’ in two devolved policy bodies in the UK – Greater Manchester Combined Authority and the Scottish Government – with declared interests in these economic agendas. Interviews revealed that social and economic policy actors conceptualised ‘health’ narrowly as biomedical, physical illness, and as shorthand for ‘health policy’. Further, some of these participants expressed resentment about health policy, while interviewees across teams expressed scepticism about HiAP. In contrast, ‘wellbeing’ was widely conceptualised similarly to the social model of health, included mental health, and was supported as a plausible common cause. This research suggests that a clearer conceptual distinction between ‘healthcare’ and ‘wellbeing’ – representing the medical and social models of health respectively – may support policy efforts to promote population health.

A key concern in the social policy literature is to understand the causes of support for – but also opposition to – egalitarian and inclusive policies and for political parties that champion such policies. While objective socio-economic factors such as class and gender have long had a central role as predictors of those attitudes in the social policy literature, scholars have more recently begun to incorporate psychological variables, notably right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) or implicit attitudes. Curiously, however, one variable that has been central in social psychological research for about three decades has so far been largely absent in the social policy literature: social dominance orientation (SDO). This omission is problematic not only because SDO is a known predictor of regressive and exclusionary attitudes, but also because SDO itself cross-cuts with other predictors of social policy attitudes (notably class) in theoretically relevant ways. Our contribution here is to highlight and demonstrate the relevance of SDO as an explanatory variable in social policy attitudes research. To do so, we draw on data from an original comparative survey covering five European countries (Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, the United Kingdom) and the United States.

The relationship between education and mental health is not well understood. Findings are mixed, especially in low- and middle-income countries. We examine the impact of education on mental health using individual-level data from over 120,000 participants across 121 countries, comprising 42 high-income countries and 79 low- and middle-income countries. Results show that better-educated individuals are less likely to experience mental health issues in the overall sample. We observe the same effect in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs); however, the effect is not significant in high-income countries (HICs). The study suggests that mental health policy should be tailored to the socioeconomic environments of LMICs and HICs. In LMICs, education can be leveraged as an important tool for improving mental health by strengthening access to material and social resources. In HICs, where education alone appears insufficient to improve mental health outcomes, the findings point to the need for broader interventions that address social, economic and psychosocial stressors across the population. Coordination between health and education sectors remains essential for developing effective and context-specific policy responses.

A central principle of basic income (BI) is unconditionality, contrasting with the prevailing trend in developed welfare systems that emphasises conditionality based on ‘activation’. While literature exists on attitudes about benefit conditionality and various BI solutions, there is limited understanding of the reasoning by individuals who have experienced a shift from conditionality to unconditionality within a BI framework. This gap highlights the need for more research on individual experiences related to these changing benefit principles. Utilising eighty-one in-depth participant interviews from the Finnish BI experiment targeting the long-term unemployed, we asked: how do experiment participants view benefit (un)conditionality after having received an unconditional basic income? Our results on the views of benefit conditionality among BI recipients proved to be quite varied. Some of the interviewees strongly supported principles of unconditionality, some basing their views on personal experience, while others opposed unconditionality, referring to their political beliefs, associating universal BI with leftist ideas, despite the Finnish experiment having been initiated by a conservative government. Interviews indicate that institutionalised norms and personal ideologies – key factors in welfare state research – significantly influence reasoning on (un)conditionality among participants in BI experiments, reflecting the work ethos of both traditional and current Nordic welfare state models.

Regarding refugees’ social protection studies in social policy and migration, research emphasises the importance of different local framework conditions as well as individual strategies of refugees. While the debates in these disciplines have so far been largely separate, this article sheds light on the interplay between strategies and local framework conditions in the context of flight. Based on qualitative interviews with refugees and local actors in twelve municipalities in Germany, we illustrate the practices of refugees in accessing and utilising social rights and services against the backdrop of fragmented local worlds. The municipalities analysed differ in terms of local policies, migration-related narratives and space. Firstly, we show that refugees pursue diverse strategies of access and participation in education, healthcare and the labour market, which are initially independent of municipal framework conditions. Secondly, we illustrate the extent to which these strategies are associated with different consequences for access to and utilisation of educational, healthcare and employment opportunities for refugees depending on local conditions. Based on our findings, we argue that social protection of refugees must be understood as an interplay between local conditions and individual practices.

This paper examines what happens to performance when public services transition to social enterprises that combine a public social value focus with private commercial revenue generation. We focus on England’s health and social care sector, which has seen the transition or ‘spin-out’ of some government-run services into social enterprises with the goal of combining high-quality services with a business focus that would allow them to be more efficient, flexible and innovative. Drawing on 2017 English Care Quality Commission (CQC) data, we use ordered logit multi-variate regression to compare quality ratings of government-run providers and social enterprise Community Interest Companies (CICs) while differentiating spin-out and non-spin-out CICs. Our study shows that services spun out into social enterprise CICs did better overall across all CQC quality ratings than government-run services; however, they did not perform as well as independently established CICs. We draw on and contribute to publicness theory to explain divergent performance across these organisational models and provide important information for policymakers deciding where to direct limited public funds for health and social care.

This paper explores recipients’ and professionals’ attitudes towards the Basic Income for Care Leavers in Wales pilot. Qualitative interviews were conducted with forty-one professionals and forty-four basic income recipients in the first year of the scheme (2022/2023). The findings are situated within Van Oorshot’s CARIN framework that aids analysis of attitudes towards the ‘deservingness’ of others. The findings indicate that there was an almost unified agreement among these participants that care leavers deserve additional support but much less agreement on whether the basic income pilot is the right way to provide this support. The findings are situated in a context where strong views have been expressed by a small number of politicians and media outlets who question the deservingness more overtly, especially when considering former unaccompanied child asylum seekers. Meanwhile, the Welsh Government, which implemented the pilot, emphasises the state’s obligations to this population and the opportunities that a basic income might facilitate. Implications of the findings relate to how future basic income schemes are justified to the public, recipients and those administering the scheme at a local level.

Unpaid carers face significant financial risks, yet how caring shapes financial wellbeing (FWB) over time has been poorly understood. Drawing on qualitative research with fifty unpaid carers in Britain, purposively sampled across age, life stage, gender, caring intensity and socio-economic status, this paper applies and extends an ecological framework of FWB for the first time in a care context. It makes three contributions. First, it provides original empirical evidence showing that the financial consequences of caregiving are cumulative, uneven and experienced differently across the life course. Second, it develops a life course conceptualisation of carer FWB, highlighting dynamic interactions between individual circumstances, family situations and work, welfare and care systems. Third, it reframes policy debates by demonstrating how care costs are systematically individualised, making structural life stage sensitive interventions essential. Effective policy responses must therefore reflect carers’ differing needs across the life course and address cumulative financial risks. This includes support with saving and affordable housing for young adult carers; clearer pension information and protection from long term care related employment breaks in mid life; and more generous, flexible benefits and trusted care services. Our conceptualisation has international relevance in contexts where reliance on unpaid care is high, and formal support remains limited.