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Family

The Family and the Law

Adoption: The journey to were we are now

May 2018: In the first of a series of papers looking at the family and the law, barrister Judith Pepper here looks at the history of adoption leading to the current system.

Adoption: The current challenges

October 2018: In this second paper in our series looking at the family and the law, barrister Judith Pepper examines the current model of adoption and some of the key challenges within it.

 

Books

Teachers or Parents: Who is responsible for raising the next generation?

Teachers or Parents: Who is responsible for raising the next generation?

Joanna Williams, September 2024

Earlier this year, Labour leader Keir Starmer announced plans for primary teachers to supervise pupils brushing their teeth during the school day, to address rising rates of dental problems in young children. Meanwhile, teachers complain that increasing proportions of pupils begin primary school still wearing nappies – so that helping children to use the toilet also becomes part of the teacher’s job. More and more… [Full Details]

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Back to basics: what is childcare policy for?

Back to basics: what is childcare policy for?: Towards a childcare system based on choice

Ellen Pasternack and George Cook, April 2024

Childcare is a larger political priority in the UK than it ever has been before, and the target of unprecedented, and growing, levels of public spending. Despite this, there is little clarity on what the purpose of childcare policy is. Politicians and policymakers often talk as though childcare policy is a labour market intervention, designed to increase the employment rate of mothers, or an educational… [Full Details]

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Universal childcare

Universal childcare: Is it good for children?

Maria Lyons, February 2024

All of the UK’s major political parties have recently declared their intentions to significantly expand state subsidies for childcare outside the home, including for babies from the age of nine months. It’s frequently said that universal “early childhood education” is a way to “give every child the best start in life”. It’s believed this will improve children’s educational outcomes, reducing social… [Full Details]

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Civitas launches new Commission on the Future for Independent Schools

Civitas launches new Commission on the Future for Independent Schools

Civitas, January 2024

Civitas has begun work on a major commission on the future for independent schools in England. Independent schools are a significant piece of our national educational infrastructure, teaching 6.5% of school pupils in England; and one whose role has changed significantly over the centuries during which they have existed. Because of this, we want to take an in-depth look at what the future… [Full Details]


Breaking the Care Ceiling

Breaking the Care Ceiling: How many care leavers go to university?

Frank Young and Daniel Lilley, September 2023

This Civitas report provides new evidence on the number of care leavers who go to university in the UK alongside the first-ever league table of care leavers at UK universities. In 2022 the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care estimated the lifetime cost of poor outcomes for children with experience of our care system was over £1 million per child. This report by… [Full Details]

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Reform the Marriage Allowance

Reform the Marriage Allowance: The case for recognising marriage in the tax system and why we should keep the Marriage Allowance

Frank Young, November 2022

Marriage is disappearing in Britain. 2021 was the first year on record that the number of children born to unmarried couples exceeded the number of children born to married couples. New research by Frank Young, head of the Children and Families Unit at Civitas, predicts that there will be almost no new marriages in England and Wales by 2062.  This Civitas publication reviews the Marriage… [Full Details]

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Why can’t mums choose?

Why can’t mums choose?: Rethinking Child Benefit and childcare spending

Frank Young, October 2022

British governments have been offering cash payments to families for almost 80 years. However, since the early nineties, childcare funding has been relentlessly focused on subsidising formal childcare to enable mothers to return to the workplace after childbirth. When we ask women with young children today whether this is what they want, they tell us it is not. Two-thirds of mothers with children aged… [Full Details]

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Political Theory and the Family

Political Theory and the Family

Charles Amos with response from Jake Scott, September 2022

This philosophical discussion paper looks at the creation of the modern welfare state in 1942 and its impact on family formation. Charles Amos argues from a libertarian perspective drawing on Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard and Herbert Spencer, showing libertarianism to be an improved upon form of rights-based liberalism, as defended by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and John Locke. Amos claims that in supporting… [Full Details]

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Parents have their say on cannabis

Parents have their say on cannabis: Civitas polling on the use of cannabis and the views of parents

Frank Young and Shaun Bailey, July 2022

6 million new cannabis users if cannabis is legalised says new Civitas polling New polling shows a million young adults (age 18-24) would try cannabis for the first time if the UK legalised cannabis. More than 1.5 million parents of primary school children would take up cannabis if it were legalised. Seven in ten parents back police using stop and search tactics to… [Full Details]

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How we think about disparity

How we think about disparity: and what we get wrong

Richard Norrie, December 2020

A government-appointed Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities has been set up to address disparity between ethnic or racial groups in outcomes relating to health, education, employment and other areas. This follows numerous reviews conducted by various governments since 2010. Drawing on the full array of existing reviews, this report by the Director of the Statistics and Policy Research Programme at Civitas, Richard Norrie… [Full Details]

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What price lockdown?

What price lockdown?

Tim Knox and Jim McConalogue, December 2020

As the UK government publishes its cost-benefit analysis of lockdown, Tim Knox and Jim McConalogue attempt to quantify the estimated costs that have been incurred in a new Working Paper, The cost of the cure. Their estimates can be used as a benchmark against which the government analysis can be measured. They find that the cost per year of life saved (QALY) ranges from… [Full Details]

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Fallen through the cracks

Fallen through the cracks: Unregistered Islamic marriages in England and Wales, and the future of legislative reform

Emma Webb, August 2020

A significant number of Muslim women in the United Kingdom are in unregistered religious-only marriages, many of whom will be unaware that they lack legal protections and access to marital rights. In this report, Emma Webb examines how the asymmetric nature of those sometimes polygamous marriages and Islamic divorce – which allows a man to instantaneously divorce his wife but makes it much harder for… [Full Details]

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Overcrowded Islands? The challenges of demographic change for the United Kingdom

Overcrowded Islands? The challenges of demographic change for the United Kingdom

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts CBE, July 2020

The UK population has grown fast in recent years – an increase of 6.6 million since 2001 with a further increase of 5.6 million expected by 2041. Even for a geographically small island, the UK is relatively crowded by comparison with France and Germany. Indeed, an overwhelming majority of British people think that the country is already overcrowded and that steps should be taken… [Full Details]

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Covid Kids

Covid Kids: The response of schools to coronavirus

Joanna Williams, July 2020

In response to coronavirus, schools closed to all but the children of key workers on 20 March 2020. The majority of children did not return before the end of the academic year, meaning they will have spent over five months out of the classroom. Schools remained closed to most pupils for such a long time because of government social distancing requirements and the teaching unions… [Full Details]

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The Corrosive Impact of Transgender Ideology

The Corrosive Impact of Transgender Ideology

Joanna Williams, June 2020

In less than two decades ‘transgender’ has gone from a term representing individuals and little used outside of specialist communities, to signifying a powerful political ideology driving significant social change. At the level of the individual, this shift has occurred through the separation of gender from sex, before reclaiming biology through an innate sense of ‘gender-identity’. In this report, Joanna Williams argues that this… [Full Details]

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Sticking Up For Siblings

Sticking Up For Siblings

Colin Brazier, August 2013

In the UK the number of only-children as a percentage of all dependent children rose from 18 per cent in 1972 to 26 per cent by 2007. Why is it that children without siblings in this country are almost twice as common as they were a generation ago? Surely it is a natal no-brainer? Childcare, time off work, the price of an extra… [Full Details]

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The Meaning of Matrimony

The Meaning of Matrimony: Debating Same-Sex Marriage

Anastasia de Waal (ed.), May 2013

In July 2013, the UK Parliament passed historic legislation to open up marriage to same-sex couples. It followed a bitter row both inside and outside the Palace of Westminster which laid bare some of the deepest divisions in our modern society. The Meaning of Matrimony: Debating Same-Sex Marriage captures that argument in a series of passionately-written essays exploring the subject from all… [Full Details]

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Second Thoughts on the Family

Second Thoughts on the Family

Anastasia de Waal, May 2008

The premise of both New Labour and Conservative policy is that people not living in married two-parent families are choosing not to. This signifies positive diversity to Labour and a decline in family values to the Conservatives. Both miss a critical reality… [Full Details]

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Family Policy, Family Changes: Sweden, Italy and Brit

Family Policy, Family Changes: Sweden, Italy and Brit

Patricia Morgan, March 2006

A comparison of family policy and its implications for human happiness and the raising of children in Britain, Italy and Sweden… [Full Details]

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