Since the 2012 Olympics in London one year ago, British sporting dominance has miraculously continued. We have also had much talk of the Olympic legacy. Apart from our continued sporting prowess, has anything changed? It’s not altogether clear what we thought was going to happen. There’s been lots of talk of a more confident and... Find out more
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Ideas, as well as people, now move more freely. We have put new models, drawn from other classes and other parts of the world, before the local people, creating new aspirations and new ideas.Michael Young and Peter Willmott.
Family and Kinship in East London, 1957
Incivility breeds incivility
Last week a supermarket cashier refused to serve a customer who was speaking on a mobile phone. This small incident caused a major public debate in the UK (the Deputy Prime Minister was asked for his verdict, as was I). But as ever, the discussion gave rise to moral panic rather than serious consideration about... Find out more
Current UK Initiatives to Put Young People to Work
The challenge in the UK Five years of recession in Britain have driven up youth unemployment (British Youth Council, 2012). Employers seem to be “hoarding” older employees (The Economist, 2013). Some estimate that up to a million young people in Britain are now not in education, employment or training (NEET) (Confederation of British Industry, 2011),... Find out more
‘Slacktivism’ vs. thick and impactful civic participation
Earlier this year, Unicef in Sweden launched a new campaign with the tagline: “Like us on Facebook and we will vaccinate zero children against Polio”. It was accompanied by a video of a young actor playing a boy whose mother is sick explaining, “I think everything will be alright. Today Unicef Sweden has 177,000 likes... Find out more
It’s getting to be a habit…but not quite yet
Today the latest set of statistics on obesity, physical activity and diet were released. They paint an all too familiar picture. Levels of obesity are rising, and levels of physical activity continue to decline – despite last summer’s sporting successes. The Young Foundation outlined many of these issues in our report Move It, released last... Find out more
Prioritising Prevention: A reaction to David Cameron’s speech on rehabilitation & justice
Today David Cameron has delivered his latest speech on crime, rehabilitation and the prison system, his first since Kenneth Clarke was replaced by Chris Grayling as Justice Secretary. We have now moved from a time where prison was said to “work”, and although we are no longer instructed to “hug a hoodie” we are told... Find out more
From Russia with Resilience
The Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad, which commemorates the victims and survivors of Leningrad greeted my arrival to the Park Inn Hotel, the venue for the World Health Organisation (WHO) Annual Healthy Cities Conference. The view of the memorial lent a sense of drama and grandeur to proceedings. Inside the hotel, delegates from... Find out more
Breaking the cycle
We all know intuitively that prevention is better than cure. Yet this does not translate easily into the way public services are prioritised or resourced, nor how we arrive at the best response to take when things go badly wrong. This has always been the case; when public spending is squeezed, questions about how to... Find out more
Payment by Results – the future of the criminal justice system?
Payment by Results is already a hot topic – discussed everywhere from broadsheets to breakfast roundtables. Funding is being cut, services are being squeezed, yet still require delivery, possibly more now than ever. With prison costing the taxpayer over £3bn a year, and the Ministry of Justice needing to find savings of £2bn by 2014,... Find out more
Tottenham – the new Brixton?
Do a Google search on “Tottenham” and you get 56 pages dominated by the football club interspersed with news and images from the recent riots. Hardly surprising that when we talked to Tottenham residents last autumn – in the wake of the riots – something that came up repeatedly was concern about the negative perception... Find out more