Recently, the Young Foundation hosted a lunchtime seminar with Dr Samantha Callan, who is a key advisor to David Cameron on family and social policy and has some responsibility for writing the Conservative manifesto. The seminar was really insightful on numerous fronts- we were able to hear about the Conservative agenda on families and societies, as well as elaborate upon some of the interesting work that the Young Foundation is doing in relation to families, parenting and wellbeing. We have recently completed a report on teenage pregnancies in Lewisham and have also released a report on parenting through the Local Wellbeing strand of the Young Foundation work. To find our more about our research and reports on family and wellbeing, please click here.

More on Dr Samantha Callan:

Dr Samantha Callan is the family and society policy specialist in the Conservative Policy Unit. This is a small team working closely with senior shadow cabinet members like David Cameron and George Osborne, to construct a coherent and consistent body of policy to take into government should the Conservatives win the next election. Prior to this she was an independent research and policy consultant working with voluntary sector organisations, (most notably Care for the Family) international family agencies and the independent thinktank, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ). She is an honourary research fellow at Edinburgh University and has a background in Social Anthropology, holding Master's degrees from the Universities of Cambridge and Nottingham, and a PhD in organisational culture change from the University of Loughborough. She authored the family breakdown sections of the Centre for Social Justice's groundbreaking reports Breakdown Britain (2006) and Breakthrough Britain (2007) and chaired the CSJ's Family Law Review and Early Years Commission.