THE FAMILY: IS IT JUST ANOTHER LIFESTYLE CHOICE? (CHOICE IN WELFARE)

Politics & Social Sciences

BRIGITTE BERGER, ALLAN CARLSON

Social Sciences

Civitas:Institute for the Study of Civil Society

Families without fatherhood (Choice in welfare)

norman-dennis-george-erdos-health-and-welfare-unit-staff-institute-of-economic-affairs-great-britain

<p>"Having won its intellectual battle for the market, London's Institute of Economic Affairs has turned its attention to the social underpinnings of a free society" Martin Wolf, The Financial Times. "Tougher policies to promote family life are being demanded by Tory MPs following a report accusing the Government of discriminating against married couples in favour of lone parents...The study...claims that many single mothers are discouraged from marrying because they will lose more in benefits than they would gain from a husband's income" The Daily Telegraph. "The rise of disorder and criminal conduct among young men has exactly coincided with their release from the social controls that formerly made husbands and fathers"Times Literary Supplement. "Patricia Morgan highlights how the lowering of tax bands, the cutting of tax rates and the removal of allowances during the 1980s mainly benefited single people and double-income couples" The Independent. "The report's most awkward evidence for ministers to rebut is its use of official DSS figures to show that a working lone parent ...is always better off than a married couple where the wife stays at home to care for the children" The Guardian. "This book is recommended reading for those researchers interested in the economics of lone parenthood" The Economic Journal.</p>

Farewell to the family?: Public policy and family breakdown in Britain and the USA (Choice in welfare)

institute-of-economic-affairs-great-britain-patricia-m-morgan

STAKEHOLDER WELFARE (CHOICE IN WELFARE)

Frank Field

Sociology

"Samuel Smiles is alive and well and available to lead us into the next decade...The Victorian moralist's universal best-seller...is a better guide to the prevailing political and economic orthodoxy than the incomprehensible texts of that other 19th century thinker, Karl Marx." Joe Rogaly, The Financial Times. "The message of this book, which is readable and full of stunning quotations, is: God helps those who help themselves. A century after smiles' death we have had to learn this all over again - the hard way." Paul Johnson, The Daily Mail. "Samuel Smiles' Self-Help is one of those books whose titles is so familiar that we think we have read it. To my shame I had not actually done so until it was splendidly reprinted this year." Peter Lilley, The Sunday Telegraph. "Self-Help is about the nobility of strengthening one's character and should provide food for thought." Times Higher Education Supplement. "As a storyteller [Smiles] is vivid, most of all when he conjures up the industrial revolutionaries: Wedgewood, Watt, Arkwright, George Stephenson and even Jonas Hanway, who taught City men their habit of carrying umbrellas." Christopher Fildes, The Spectator.

Self-help (Rediscovered Riches)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Samuel, Smiles

Psychology & Counseling

The Realities of Rationing: "Priority Setting" in the NHS (Choice in Welfare 50)

John Spiers

Sir William Macpherson's inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence claimed to find evidence of 'institutional' or 'unwitting' racism in the Metropolitan Police Service. However, the inquiry's findings were controversial. No evidence was produced - at least in the sense in which evidence is understood in a court of law. The definition of racism which Macpherson devised was contentious because it was unprovable, and Macpherson failed to give weight to alternative explanations for the way in which Stephen Lawrence's killers escaped prosecution. In this collection of essays John Grieve of the Metropolitan Police's Racial and Violent Crime Task Force accepts the charge of institutional racism and gives an account of the ways in which the MPS is seeking to combat this. Home Office Minister Mike O'Brien expands this with an account of measures which the Home Office is adopting to eliminate racism in all of its departments. Robert Skidelsky and Michael Ignatieff, on the other hand, argue that the real issue is police ineffectiveness, which impacts on all Londoners, black and white. The contributors to this book raise profound questions about the nature of policing in a free society and ask if the police must now be colour-conscious instead of colour blind. "Race crusaders have exploited the 1993 murder of black teenage Stephen Lawrence to boost their own power, it was claimed yesterday." The Sun. "The recommendations of the Macpherson Report 'are likely to diminish rather than improve racial harmony', it is claimed today." The Daily Telegraph. "The Home Office minister responsible for the police, Mike O'Brien, has argued that the term institutional racism is no longer appropriate to a police service that is attempting to change its ways...the liberal historian and journalist Michael Ignatieff makes the even better suggestion that what the police ought to concentrate on in the issue of competence, not racism." The Tablet.

Institutional Racism and the Police: Fact or Fiction? (Civil Society)

Mike O'Brien

John Grieve

We're (Nearly) All Victims Now! (Civil Society)

David G. Green

<p>Learning to read is the basis of a good education. Children who read well and read early gain an advantage that will stay with them throughout life. But what is the best way to teach children to read? For over thirty years, reading has been a battleground on which rival theories have fought for supremacy, to the bewilderment of parents who, all too often, have had to stand by while their children were struggling. Now, after conclusive research, the battle has been won - by synthetic phonics. Phonics teaches children to decipher words by recognising the 44 sounds that make up the English language. It is straightforward and easy to grasp. It is an approach that was used for hundreds of years until it was ousted by competing approaches favoured by sections of the educational establishment. Now, however, phonics is back.As of September 2007, all state schools are obliged to teach reading by synthetic phonics. Irina Tyk has championed phonics throughout the long 'dark age' in which other approaches held sway. "The Butterfly Book" was her attempt to codify the elements of her approach that she knew were effective in getting children to read. First written in 1993, it has been available since then in copies produced in small print-runs for a dedicated market. Now Civitas is proud to present this new, popular edition, aimed at teachers and parents who know that phonics works, and want the means to put it into practice. At Holland House School, of which Irina Tyk is the Head, children are expected to be reading independently after three terms.When Irina Tyk taught reading by phonics at a summer school for Bengali children in Whitechapel in 2005, the average reading age of the children (measured on the Holborn Reading Scale) increased by ten months in just two weeks of morning lessons. "The Butterfly Book" is the standard reading text book used in supplementary schools run by Civitas for disadvantaged children, as it has proved most effective in overcoming problems with reading in children of all ages and backgrounds. By following the simple instructions contained in this book, parents and teachers can quickly learn how to give children the excellent start in life that literacy will always confer.</p>

The Butterfly Book: A Reading and Writing Course

Children's Books

Tyk, Irina

Education & Reference

The fate of the family is high on the public policy agenda. There are fewer marriages and more divorces; fewer births but a higher proportion outside marriage; more cohabitation and more people living alone. So is the family declining or just changing? And what do we mean by 'family' anyway? In the first part of this book John Haskey, the distinguished and widely-respected head of the Social Statistics Unit within the Demography and Health Division of the Office for National Statistics, sets out the facts. The changes which are occurring in family life are of unprecedented magnitude and speed. The 'traditional' family, headed by a married couple, is still in the majority, but it is a shrinking majority and, because the movement away from marriage is most noticeable in younger age-groups, we can expect the process of change to intensify in the short-term. Under the editorship of Miriam David, Professor and Dean of Research at the London Institute, two respected commentators examine the raw data from their different perspectives. Kathleen Kiernan, a co-director of the ESRC Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) at the London School of Economics and Political Science, argues for family policies which are based on the recognition of parenthood rather than marriage. Patricia Morgan, Senior Research Fellow in the family at CIVITAS, asks whether any culture can survive the disintegration of the central institution which transmits the values which hold it together. "Fragmentation of traditional British family life is graphically illustrated in an analysis of social trends by John Haskey, of the Office of National Statistics." The Daily Telegraph. "Morgan...argues that we should not accept the disintegration of the husband-wife family as the central way of raising children, but instead should seek to reverse it. Her concern is that the collapse of the married-couple family as the normal means of rearing children may threaten the cohesion of society." Community Care. "Morgan's analysis of the 'inescapable data', showing the advantages of marriage and stable family life as well as the 'looking-glass logic' which inverts them, stands as a robust corrective to the irrationality, ideology and ignorance which now pass for debate on the family." Times Literary Supplement. "Patricia Morgan warns: 'What we are witnessing now is not the formalisation of other "family structures", but deregulation of the conjugal nuclear family which we have known for centuries.'" The Guardian.

The Fragmenting Family: Does It Matter? (Choice in Welfare)

Morgan, Patricia

Kiernan, Kathleen

Haskey, John

David, Miriam

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