Concerns over the impact of debt on participation in higher education (HE) have dominated much of the debate surrounding the most recent reforms of financial support for full-time students in England, including the introduction of variable tuition fees. Yet few studies have attempted to explore this issue in a statistically robust manner. This article attempts to fill that gap. It examines the relationship between prospective HE students' attitudes to debt, and their decisions about whether or not to enter HE. Using data derived from a survey of just under 2,000 prospective students, it shows how those from low social classes are more debt averse than those from other social classes, and are far more likely to be deterred from going to university because of their fear of debt, even after controlling for a wide range of other factors. The article concludes that these findings pose a serious policy dilemma for the Westminster government. Their student funding policies are predicated on the accumulation of debt and thus are in danger of deterring the very students at the heart of their widening participation policies.

This article attempts to account for the existence of parallel systems of values in families where grandparents condemn divorce, yet act to support their adult children when they face relationship breakdown. The article seeks to understand the context in which values are formed and how they can gradually become more complex and contradictory as social and personal contexts change. The article explores change across two generations of family relationships in order to add to the debate on whether commitments within families are in decline. It also addresses the question of how policies on families can be formulated given the complexity, and contradictory nature, of the values that family members hold.

This article addresses the role of grandparents as providers of childcare for their grandchildren, and the importance of this role in helping the mothers to enter the labour market. Several childcare surveys indicate that grandparents make a very important contribution, which appears to be sustained over time. Demographic modelling shows that the chances of young children having a maternal grandmother under 70 have risen since 1981, although she is now less likely to live nearby.

New evidence from the UK Time Use Survey suggests that grandparents' help has an important influence on whether mothers of young children do take employment, especially those with lower earnings potential. This help also enables them to work longer hours and earn more. However, employed older women play a considerably smaller role in childcare for other households than those without jobs. Analysis of childcare trends from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) suggests that help from relatives, of whom the biggest category are known from several other sources to be grandparents, has become an important complement to part-time formal care as pre-school places expanded since the late 1990s. Raising employment rates amongst the over 50s is an established objective of government policy, yet it may conflict with the role of younger grandparents in childcare.

Under New Labour, partnerships have emerged to become a central mechanism of service delivery in social policy. In response to this development, a number of papers and texts have appeared that have questioned the claims made for the benefits of partnerships by politicians and policy makers. In particular, the gap between the rhetoric of inclusiveness and the practice of exclusion in partnership working has been highlighted. However, as pertinent as these insights are, it is argued here that extant research into partnerships in social policy remains theoretically undeveloped, characterised by one-sided approaches that either lack critical edge or are dismissive of the potential of partnership working. What is required is an approach that addresses the deeper contradictions of partnerships in social policy and the structuring relations of power underpinning the conceptions of partnerships. Drawing on key concepts in social and political theory, this article proposes a theoretical framework that focuses on the dynamic and contextual nature of partnership. In short, a differentiated theory of partnership is offered as a means of facilitating a more realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities of partnership working. A case study on partnerships in sport policy is used to illustrate the analysis.

This article considers different approaches to policy evaluation within recent writings on governance and evaluation research. Governance theorists locate evaluation within a new ‘mode of regulation’ aimed at managing a ‘dispersed state at arms length’. The strength of this approach is that it places policy evaluation within an explicitly political framework. However, the governance perspective focuses on evaluation as a state-centred activity and tends to underplay its contested nature. Within the evaluation research literature, on the other hand, attempts to deal with the ‘politics of evaluation’ tend to focus on evaluation as a research practice. This misses the discursive construction of evaluation as a political project. While some approaches within the evaluation literature stress the ‘democratising’ role of ‘stakeholder participation’, they are set within a democratic pluralist model of politics, which frequently fails to deal with underlying power relations within which the clash of competing stakeholder interests takes place. This article challenges these constructions. It draws on the strengths of both approaches to propose a critical ‘politics of evaluation’ based on service user control. It suggests some practical strategies drawn from a review of recent evaluation research.

Britain's New Labour government will spend some 133 billion this year on social protection for vulnerable groups with low incomes such as pensioners, disabled people, and working families with and without children. It also regularly reviews the National Minimum Wage for workers. Although its intentions are laudable, the government can be criticised for setting income floors with little or no grounded assessment of individual welfare requirements. Budget standards, originating in Rowntree's work on poverty at the close of the nineteenth century, offers an alternative for setting minimum incomes. Used by Beveridge in 1942 to rationalise the proposal for social security levels, they have largely been neglected by successive governments and were recently rejected by New Labour in its review of child poverty measures. Academic research, however, continues to identify non-arbitrary income thresholds. The transparency of evidence to maintain a defined standard of living along with the minimal personal costs involved are key attractions. The challenge remains to find a generally acceptable standard. How much emphasis should be given to scientific prescriptions for health compared to popular cultural practices captured by national surveys of poverty and social exclusion or agreed by the consensus of ordinary citizens in focus groups? This article considers the current debate within UK social policy.

Comparative welfare state research has devoted little attention to the social rights of migrants or the ethnic/racial dimension, even though societies are becoming more ethnically diverse through international migration. Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study for the UK, the USA, Germany, France, Denmark and Sweden, this article represents an initial attempt to compare the social rights of migrants and citizens across welfare regimes. We examine the substantive social rights of migrants and ethnic minorities by focusing on their participation in social transfer programmes, and the impact of transfers on their ability to maintain a socially acceptable standard of living compared with the rest of the population. The analysis shows that there are major disparities between how migrant and citizen households fare in welfare states, and that the discrepancies widen for migrants of colour. When the analysis is confined to citizen households, the results largely correspond to the expected performance of welfare regimes. However, when migrants are incorporated into the analysis, intra-regime variations stand out in the case of the liberal and social democratic countries.

The welfare state is the distinctive contribution of Europe to the modern world. Other places do market capitalism better, and democracy, art and culture at least as well. However, the future of the European welfare state is in question, as a result of economic globalisation, pressures from population ageing and other social changes and the dominance of an EU primarily committed to creating an open market to rival that of the US. An important recent critique of the welfare state project argues that social cohesion and diversity are simply incompatible – with the implication, that as Europe grows more diverse, welfare states will wither. An influential variant of this argument uses statistical modelling to support the argument that greater ethnic diversity accounts for the failure of the US to develop political support for a welfare state on European lines (and implies that Europe's future is American). This article demonstrates that the model used fails to take into account the significance of left politics in European countries. The evidence is that the left substantially counteracts the impact of greater diversity on welfare states in Europe. The case that increased migration will undermine popular commitment to social spending is not proven.