Lead supervisor:
Prof Jonathan Scourfield 
Start date: October 2017
Award: General
Subject Pathway:
Social Care, Social Work and Social Policy
Thematic Cluster:
Society and Well-Being Cluster
Child Welfare Inequality in the Four Nations of the UK
My area of research is Child Welfare Inequalities in the Four Nations of the UK. It builds on research that identified children are much more likely to come into the child protection system and into care (i.e. be ‘looked after’) in areas which are more deprived. Furthermore, there are big differences in intervention rates between the nations of the UK, with the rate of looked-after children in Wales, for example, being 1.5 higher than that in England. The proposed project will explore this terrain of child welfare inequalities and variation between nations. It will explore questions such as why looked-after children rates are higher in Wales than those in England, even after taking account of the relatively higher levels of deprivation in Wales and how the social gradient, with children in more deprived areas more likely to be looked after or in the child protection system, is different in Wales from in the other four nations of the UK.