Promoting Children's Wellbeing: Policy and Practice

This book is the second in the Open University's Working Together for Children series, which draws together interdisciplinary approaches to working with children from birth to 12 years old. This volume focuses on the range of policies and practices aimed at improving children's wellbeing in the UK.

This has become a growing area of debate following the shock findings of the 2007 Unicef report on child wellbeing in rich countries, which placed the UK well down the rankings. Since then, new league tables have appeared at regular intervals. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of York placed the UK fifth from the bottom of 29 European countries. And an even more recent study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development identified the UK as performing particularly poorly on risky behaviours. The message that comes through from these studies is that UK policies and practices are not having the desired impact.