Meet our SPA Policy Groups

This group brings together two formerly separate groups (the Employment Policy in Context Group and the Employment and Social Security Policy Group). 

This group, currently led by Ceri Hughes and Katy Jones, focuses on:

• Employment support and Active Labour Market Policy
• Links between employment and social security
• Gender and other social inequalities
• Employment protection, regulation, and enforcement
• Demand-side policies and employer perspectives;
• Skills policy; and efforts to promote good work and in-work progression, particularly as a means of overcoming disadvantage;
• Strategic approaches to economic recovery and addressing inequalities;
• Setting employment policy in broader context (e.g. how other policy areas contribute, and considering how employment policies play out in particular types of place
• UK employment policy in comparative and international perspective

Read employment and social security resources produced by the group:

• Teaching resources list (word doc)
• Long reading list (word doc)
• Data sources (excel).

If you are interested in joining the Employment Policy Group network, please contact Ceri Hughes (ceri.hughes@manchester.ac.uk) or Katy Jones (katy.jones@mmu.ac.uk).

People are also encouraged to share information through the group mailing list (via jiscmail) and to follow the X / Twitter account @SPAemploysocsec for updates.

We’re a wide-ranging group with interests in pretty much anything to do with housing policy – from community-led housing and queer housing to sustainability and ageing in place. We’re particularly keen to reintegrate housing into social policy debates – to remind academics, policy-makers and practitioners that discussions of welfare, health, inequality and the future of the welfare state are incomplete without understanding homes and housing.

In terms of activities, we’ve run workshops and symposia, produced introductory teaching materials and put together a themed section in Social Policy and Society. In January 2024, the Climate Justice and Housing Policy groups organised an event on tackling housing decarbonisation in a cost of living crisis. You can read and view a report of the event here. You can also read a related blog on a ‘radical sufficiency’ approach to inadequate housing here.

And we’re always open to new members and new ideas – get in touch if you’d like to be involved, raise a question, or make a suggestion. We’re especially keen to hear from Early Career Researchers.

Contact Steve Rolfe: steve.rolfe@stir.ac.uk.

Twitter / X: @HousingSpa

Read the list of key housing policy teaching resources produced by the group here (word doc).

Despite the urgency of responding to the climate emergency, scholarship on climate change and the environment has remained fragmented and marginalised within social policy. In response, the Climate Justice and Social Policy Group (CUSP), led by Carolyn Snell and Harriet Thomson, was formed to kick-start processes of embedding environmental thinking across all domains of the discipline, placing an emphasis on inequality, justice and underrepresented groups.

Between 2021-2022, the group organised two SPA symposiums alongside an interactive workshop with 100+ academics and practitioners to map the intersections between key domains of social policy and climate change, and a series of policy focused roundtable events. In 2023, CUSP published a themed section on the climate crisis in the Journal of Social Policy and Society.

In January 2024, the Climate Justice and Housing Policy groups organised an event on tackling housing decarbonisation in a cost of living crisis. You can read and view a report of the event here. You can also read a related blog on a ‘radical sufficiency’ approach to inadequate housing here.

If you are passionate about a socially just future in the face of climate challenges and want to contribute to the group, please get in touch with Carolyn Snell on carolyn.snell@york.ac.uk, and on X / Twitter give us a follow @CUSP_SPA.

Families have a vital role to play in supporting the welfare of societies. The Family Policy Group provides a unique, interdisciplinary space to explore and discuss the ever-evolving relationship and intersection between families and social policy, and the complexity of their roles in sustaining societal welfare. In recent years, the evolving relationship between the family and social policy has become ever more apparent. Within a context of increasing inequalities associated with encroaching neoliberal welfare and familial policies, a continued challenge is that the individuals that comprise families are being made increasingly responsible for their own welfare with limited and conditional support from social security.

Family policies also remain at the centre of social debates. More recently, there has been a significant increase of interest in the extent to which low-income families have been supported to weather multiple accumulating crises, not least the pandemic and cost of living crisis. The crisis of childcare provision and a push towards improved parental leave are also high on campaign and policy agendas and are galvanising commentators, policy makers and academics alike.

Bringing together shared expertise in this broad thematic area, our aim as a group is to establish a stronger platform from which to shape policy narratives and practice approaches in an empirically driven and collaborative way. Underpinned by an ethos of care, compassion and collaboration, the group will foster a collective approach with the shared goal of improving understanding of policy changes that are relevant to families. We also aim to collate evidence for the purposes of campaigning on and influencing policy decisions that impact on diverse experiences of family life.

Linked websites:

Following Young Fathers Further: https://followingyoungfathersfurther.org/

Thomas Coram Research Unit: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-and-centres/centres/thomas-coram-research-unit

To enquire about the group please contact group leads Professor Anna Tarrant (atarrant@lincoln.ac.uk) and Dr Linzi Ladlow (lladlow@lincoln.ac.uk)

Increased costs of living experienced by nine in ten adults in the UK, restrictions on protests and judicial reviews, and displacements of 110 million people because of war and political instability – with many countries, including the UK, tightening their borders against refugees from these communities: all of these trends exemplify social harm on a mass scale. These phenomena demonstrate the intensification of social and economic inequalities and injustice.

Social harm is both a conceptual tool and a meta-analytical approach that connects the examination of contemporary societal issues with underlying factors such as unfairness, injustice, discrimination, exploitation, repression, inequality, indifference, and exclusion. Scrutiny of these factors remain incomplete if they are not linked systematically to the power of political and economic elites who can influence how harm is acknowledged and responded to.

Led by Nasrul Ismail and Christina Pantazis, our Policy Group aims to:

1. Advance knowledge of social harm about contemporary societal issues;
2. Foster collaborative, interdisciplinary, and cross-cutting research activities by bringing scholars from interdisciplinary perspectives together around a range of common interests;
3. Create pedagogical resources for teachers, researchers, and students across the UK, employing interactive, reflective, and experiential methods; and
4. Provide opportunities to cascade research and knowledge beyond academia to enhance the effectiveness of governmental and non-governmental organisations in dealing with pressing social harms.

You can also find out more about our Social Harm Policy Group here.

We are always keen to hear suggestions and ideas for collaborations. We welcome new members, particularly Early Career Researchers, PhD students, and colleagues from outside of the UK. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us at Nasrul.Ismail@bristol.ac.uk and C.Pantazis@bristol.ac.uk.

The Pensions Social Policy Group is currently led by Liam Foster, Hayley James and Ellie Suh.

The group’s overarching goal is to provide opportunities and support for researchers at all stages of their careers to engage in debates, activities and events regarding pensions policy in the UK and beyond. In doing so it aims to stimulate a better understanding of the role of pensions in social policy teaching and research.

This will be achieved through:

• Organising activities to exchange ideas and foster collaborations regarding pensions, such as SPA conference symposia, workshops, and roundtable discussions.
• Engaging with members of the broader pension policy and practice community.
• Creating a diverse range of outputs such as blogs and podcasts on hot pension topics.
• Building and sharing materials on pensions policy, including delivering a list of key resources for SPA members with an interest in the field of pensions.

If you are interested in joining the Pensions Policy Group network, please contact Liam Foster (l.foster@sheffield.ac.uk), Hayley James (h.james1@aston.ac.uk) and Ellie Suh (e.suh@bham.ac.uk).