Over the last two hundred years, Britain has witnessed a dramatic shift in the level of concern and attention paid to the issue of child poverty. Child poverty is now high on the policy agenda and is broadly recognised as a problem for society and a fit subject for policy intervention. By setting the development of this policy agenda in historical perspective, this book aims to illuminate both the complex relationship between research and policy, and the way in which policy constructs its own objects of intervention. The role of research into child poverty has sometimes been perceived as being simply about identifying extent, causes and solutions, on which policy makers can then act. As this book argues, however, child poverty becomes politically salient only at certain moments and under certain conditions. Further, the emotive power of childhood, which makes a political imperative out of children’s disadvantage, is also mediated to a greater or lesser extent by particular ideological and political concerns prevailing at different times. Research can, nevertheless, help to create the conditions and to set the parameters for the ways in which governments respond when they do so. The discovery of child poverty and its place at the forefront of the current political agenda have been, then, both a matter of the quantification, study and accounts of child poverty and the recognition of such accounts and their relevance to the polity.

This book provides a broad introduction to developments in child poverty research and the fluctuating attention paid to child poverty over an extended period. A historical understanding of child poverty and the development of child poverty research is an important element to grasping one of the most topical issues of today. As Paul Pierson points out in his discussion of the ways, and extent to which, welfare state institutions themselves influence the conditions surrounding possibilities for their change,