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The purpose of this paper is to provide a snapshot of secondary school food policy (SSFP) across the devolved nations (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) to offer insights into a growing area of policy concern. The selected context of research is school food policy (SFP), an area of research which has received little attention in terms of policy approaches. The review is focused on 2010 to 2022.

This work combines interdisciplinary perspectives spanning across food policy, public health, psychology, education and sociology. This combination has merit as it offers different perspectives in terms of understanding SFP. The study was conducted between August 2021 and March 2022, using a desk-based review, analysing policies on food in secondary schools. Data collection was conducted through the Web using key search terms. The READ (Read, Extract, Analyse, Distil) approach was used as a systematic procedure to analyse policy and evaluation documents.

To all levels of government, it is recommended that a coherent policymaking approach be used to tackle SSFP improvements, to progress a whole school approach to food, supported by long-term dedicated resources while engaging children in SSFP development. For education departments, it is recommended that a food curriculum review, connected to school meals alongside a refocus on school food standards monitoring and reporting is crucial in serving the future generations. The current economic crisis has had an impact on public spending. Universal Free School Meals has been said to make an enormous difference to well-being.

The current findings suggest that researching SFP across nations has merit. There is a relative lack of focus on secondary schools, in light of England’s focus on the National Food Strategy (focus on children), post-pandemic, economic crisis – together this makes school food and food policy a topic of real urgency and importance. Lessons can both be learned, particularly in promoting healthier and more educationally inclusive school food practices. Research in this area can inform curriculum design and school food environment and system changes from the perspective of learnings around taking a whole school food approach to education.

This paper aims to explore the lived experiences of key stakeholders working with homeless people during the implementation of universal credit during the austerity years.

The literature on austerity reveals welfare reforms’ impact on support services staff. Service providers’ perceptions of the impact of austerity-led policies and welfare reform via nine interviews with people working in homelessness organisations in Brighton and Hove in the UK. Service providers see the situation for their service users has gotten worse and that the policies make it more difficult to extricate themselves from their current situation. Three central themes relating to the impact of austerity-led welfare reforms were, namely, Universal Credit: the imposition of a precarious livelihood on welfare claimants; a double-edged sword: “If people are sanctioned: people can’t pay”; and “Hard to maintain my own mental equilibrium”.

More precisely, this paper captures service providers’ perceptions and experiences of the impact of austerity-led policies on their services and how they believe this, in turn, impacts their clients and their own lives.

The dimension cuts across service provision to vulnerable people and is intertwined with health and well-being outcomes. Austerity is detrimental to the health of service users and their clients. It is known that when it comes to the health and well-being of the most vulnerable, who have suffered most from the impacts of austerity policies. However, in times of open austerity, it falls also on those trying to ease their suffering.

The data suggest that policies were developed and accentuated by austerity, which led to the stripping of welfare support from vulnerable people. This process has impacted the people who rely on welfare and service providers.

This study addresses a gap in evidence on small employer experiences of managing mental health problems in the workplace. The authors gathered first-hand experiences of small business managers to empirically investigate how the small business context affects the management and support of mental health problems in the workplace, and the practice implications that arise.

Qualitative interviews, combining semi-structured and narrative approaches, with 21 small business managers with experience of managing employees with mental health difficulties. The 21 managers recounted a total of 45 employee cases, which were analysed thematically, using a case-based matrix. Study participants were drawn from small businesses within England and Scotland (UK). Interviews were conducted between November 2019 and February 2020.

Support aligned with current understanding of effective practice, yet was often informal, instinctive and flexible. Accommodating employees with mental health problems impacted the workload of managers and co-workers, and business operation and growth. Challenges and tensions reflected the difficult balancing act faced by managers in organisations of all sizes. However, the intensity and immediacy of cross-pressures was enhanced for small businesses, due to their smaller workforce and lack of dedicated Human Resource Management and occupational health expertise.

Guidance should address the navigation of day-to-day management and support for employees with mental health difficulties, including approaches to balancing the needs of the wider workforce and business operation. Access to HR and occupational health expertise is valuable. Financial subsidies may be of lesser concern to small businesses.

This study offers originality in focusing exclusively on small business managers with first-hand experience of supporting employees with mental health problems. Findings challenge the perception that small firms have unique experiences, whilst highlighting contextual features that exacerbate intensity and immediacy of impacts.

This study aims to investigate whether social investment (SI) policies improve employment among single mothers.

This paper analyzes the potential effects of SI policies on vulnerable individuals and workers at the macro level by using the employment position of single mothers as a dependent variable. Time-series cross-national data from 18 OECD countries between 1998 and 2017 are analyzed. Multilevel model analysis is also used for robustness check.

I find that public spending on education and family support is positively associated with the employment rates of single mothers. In contrast, active labor market policy (ALMP) spending is negatively associated. ALMP’s negative effects stand out particularly with public spending on job training. Of all family support policies, family allowances are positively associated with single mothers’ employment, which runs counter to the conventional argument that family allowances are a disincentive for women’s or mothers’ employment. Paid leave (length and generosity) is also associated with higher employment for single mothers. There is also some tentative evidence that public spending on maternity leave benefits (spending level) may raise the odds of single mothers being employed, when individual-level factors are controlled for in multilevel analysis we implement for robustness check.

This paper does not analyze the effects of the qualitative properties of SI policies. Future research is necessary in this respect.

The effects of SI policies on employment among single mothers have not yet been examined in the literature. This paper seeks to be a first cut at measuring the effects.

The America Rescue Plan (ARP) transformed the Child Tax Credit (CTC) into a more generous, inclusive monthly payment from July through December 2021. However, the expansion has been terminated and the annual CTC has been reinstated. The United States is one of the few OECD countries that do not have a child allowance system and South Korea has recently adopted child allowance in 2018. This study aims to comprehensively review the existing literature and evidence on ARP-CTC in the United States and Universal Child Allowance (CA) in Korea.

The researchers completed a database search between July 1, 2022 and July 20, 2022. For the United States, the search keywords were child tax credit OR expanded child tax credit OR CTC OR child allowance. For Korea, the search keyword was child allowance. Searches were conducted using 79 databases. A total of 36 US studies and 7 Korean studies met all the inclusion criteria and proceeded to the extraction process. A narrative thematic synthesis approach was employed to identify themes in the findings. The results were organized based on the characteristics of the studies and the post-intervention outcomes.

Studies in the United States focused primarily on economic outcomes, including poverty and material hardship, reflecting the concern policymakers and researchers have about child poverty. On the other hand, Korean studies examined employment, economic well-being, psychological well-being and expenditures in a relatively balanced share. Overall, studies found that both ARP-Child Tax Credits and Universal Child Allowance reduced child poverty and improved material hardship. Also, studies in both countries suggested that both policies had positive impacts on parental psychological well-being.

To the authors knowledge, this paper is the first to comprehensively review the impact of the US ARP-CTC in comparison with the Korean child allowance. Two studies reviewed and updated the literature on US ARP-CTC as a round-up paper. Moreover, the authors conduct cross-national comparative analyses between the United States and Korea. The contexts of the child allowance system in the two nations have both similarities and differences, thereby offering a unique opportunity for a comparative study.

The purpose of this paper is to compare home care workers' views of their employment conditions by provider type – private for-profit vs public and non-profit – using the case study of Ireland.

An online survey was distributed to care workers (n = 350) employed by private for-profit, public and non-profit home care providers in Ireland. Returned questionnaires were analysed statistically in R using chi-squared tests to systematically compare key aspects of employment conditions.

Analysis shows that conditions are perceived to be significantly worse for those employed by private for-profit providers (and to a lesser extent non-profit organisations) compared to the public provider. There are wide disparities between public and private sector conditions in terms of contracts, pensions, unsocial hours pay and travel time allowances. The main area of convergence is in relation to employer support, where although the public sector performed better, the difference between the three provider types is smaller.

Relatively little research compares working conditions in private for-profit providers vs public and non-profit providers in Ireland and other countries. The findings can be understood in the context of marketisation reforms and may partly be explained by a lack of regulation in Ireland's home care sector and low unionisation rates amongst care workers employed by private for-profit providers.

This article aims to link discussions of the role of earnings-related pension measures with time in Hong Kong (HK) and the United Kingdom (UK). It presents a new conceptual “time-based framework” to explore two related types of government response to the way people accumulate pension incomes through participation in paid work. The first is to consider governments' perceptions of appropriate time in work and retirement. The second is to consider how governments use pension measures to influence the connection between the amount of time people spend in paid work and retirement.

This is a conceptual paper. The time-based framework is developed using literature concerning discretionary time and the social construction of time. To explore the empirical significance of this framework, the authors discuss how it can be applied to the analysis of earnings-related pension measures in HK and the UK.

The evidence generated from the discussion of the earnings-related pension measures in HK and the UK shows that pension policies can serve both as a financial and time instrument. At the same time as influencing the connection between the amount of time people spend in paid work and the pensions they can accumulate, pension policies can be used to convey the government's views on important time issues, namely the appropriate length of time in work and retirement, and the relative value of the time spent in paid work and providing informal care.

A new framework is developed to explore the connection between the studies of earnings-related pension measures and time, which is an understudied area.

Employment-related measures play a significant part in preventive and mitigative social policies. The importance of these actions is especially emphasised in times of crisis. This paper provides empirical insights into employment-related measures implemented in a sample of OECD countries as a response to the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. Furthermore, it addresses the continuity of the measures by July 2022.

The research applies and further develops a capability approach in the COVID-19 context to provide a theoretically informed empirical understanding of the implemented employment related measures.

The results indicate that countries expanded the coverage of previous preventive and mitigative employment measures horizontally and vertically while also introducing new schemes to protect workers. The main conclusions suggest that most employment-related measures (65.5%) were preventive aiming at saving jobs and broadening peoples capabilities with bridging measures during the crisis. The employment measures served first as an emergency aid. However, most measures were recalibrated and changed incrementally toward 2022.

The data consisted major employment-related measures and changes in social policies the studied countries. The authors focussed the examination on governmental-level measures. Thus, sub-national or sector-specific responses, for example tripartite agreements in certain employment sectors or social transfers in certain areas, were excluded.

The way in which welfare states reacted to employment problems during the COVID-19 pandemic may have an impact on how governments approach social policies in the future. The capability approach exhibits a pronounced strength by facilitating the establishment of sustainable trajectories for social policy and welfare services.

The capability approach embracing the preactive and proactive role of social policies lends a unique perspective on public policies.