Positive thinking

Paul Bywaters, University of Huddersfield   A child growing up in the UK is much less likely to be doing so in care if they live in Northern Ireland rather than England, Scotland or Wales. That’s the finding of a new study from my colleagues and I working on the Child Welfare Inequalities Project, which highlights just how profoundly unequal children’s chances are of being in care or experiencing abuse or neglect. Our research set out to identify inequalities in children’s chances of being on a child protection plan or register – essentially a confirmed case of abuse or neglect – or of being in care, or what’s called a looked after child. We analysed data for about 36,000 children in contact with child protection services in 55 local authorities or trusts in 2015 and examined the minutiae of what happened in eight of them. The four UK countries of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales create a kind of natural experiment in children’s social care with differing...

Chris Rolph, Nottingham Trent University Hundreds of headteachers from schools across the country marching on Downing Street is not something you see very often. But many school leaders feel compelled to take drastic action over the issue of school funding. Headteachers are not normally a militant group – they tend to spend their working days encouraging others to conform. But lack of money has caused them to take to the streets. For several years now headteachers, principals and CEOs of multi-academy trusts have been calling for adequate and fairer funding for their schools. At first glance it might seem their cries have been answered: government ministers and DfE officials repeatedly state that “there is more money going into our schools than ever before”. And, with total school funding set to rise to more than £40 billion by 2020, you might wonder what heads have got to complain about. Funding is of course only half the story, as expenses are also increasing. The Df...

Steffen Böhm, University of Exeter ; Annika Skoglund, Uppsala University , and Dan Eatherley, University of Exeter   Recent years have witnessed the emergence of what appears to be a new breed of business person: the corporate activist. Hardly a week goes past without the head of some blue chip or other publicly agitating for a better world, be they Tim Cook, CEO of Apple , speaking out on the environment and LGBTQI+ rights, or Starbucks founder Howard Schultz bemoaning “the violence, hatred, and empowerment of white supremacists” at a nationalist rally in Charlottesville. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review even offered a “CEO activist’s playbook” as a “guide for leaders who are deciding whether to speak out and how”. A closely allied trend is so-called “ brand activism ” in which businesses launch carefully designed “social good” campaigns aimed at building awareness about a particular issue while also promoting a positive corporate message. Recent h...

The UK is one of the few countries to require employers with over 250 employees to disclose their gender pay gap data. New regulations came into force in April 2017, and 10,527 employers have now submitted their figures . They offer some useful lessons in how to make pay more equal for men and women. 1. There’s still confusion The gender pay gap and pay equity are often conflated. The gender pay gap shows the difference in the average hourly wage of all men and women across a workforce. The gap widens when women do more of the less well-paid jobs within an organisation than men. It is useful in measuring pay equality due to its simple calculation, but it doesn’t measure the pay difference between men and women at the same pay grade, doing the same job, with the same working pattern. More than 200 organisations had to change their data, and over 900 reported an improbable zero pay gap by mean and median . There’s an estimate that more than 9% of reports may be wrong. This sug...