Governments around the world reacted in different ways and showed varying levels of preparedness to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet they all had to reconsider assumptions about personal freedoms, social security, health and social care, childcare and education. This volume showcases examples of responses to the pandemic and their implications for social policy from a wide range of countries. Compared with previous volumes, this year's contributions are much more international and were written in the summer of 2020 in an ever-changing and uncertain landscape. They share a commitment to grasp some the most important issues highlighted by the pandemic, yet they can only do so with limited information. With time, the implications of COVID-19 will emerge in full, and the contributions in this volume are important for setting the research agenda of social policy for the years to come.

Chapter 1 by Nguyen, Breznau and Heukamp explores the relationship between public preferences around restrictions of personal freedom and governments’ ability to curtail social behaviours. They measure public preferences using a measure of public attitudes that predates COVID-19 and correlate this with an online poll data on risky behaviours such as attending social gatherings during the pandemic. Despite the very clear limitations of the data, which they explain, they provide clear and thought-provoking theories on the trade-off between government restrictions and public behaviour during the pandemic, and their interesting if tentative results will shape future contributions in this field.

Chapter 2 by Valadas is broad in scope, and sets out to examine the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic, and earlier crises such as the global financial crisis of 2007–8, have accelerated the move towards a more coherent ‘Social Europe’. Providing detailed analysis of the social policies that have been put in place, particularly in relation to efforts to tackle job insecurity and extend welfare payment, and implement social rights, the chapter explores the nuanced policy and politics of the recent trajectory that, haltingly and sometimes painfully, seems to be moving the EU towards a more unified approach to social policy.

King-Hill, Greener and Powell bring together in Chapter 3 the literatures on policy learning and lesson-drawing with intra-crisis learning literature in order to examine three different sources of ‘learning lessons’ from overseas and the past in the COVID-19 pandemic; namely, the political, scientific and media lenses.

The last decade has seen an unmistakable rise of new forms of (primarily) online activism driven by the social justice commitments of younger generations, facilitated by social media and new technologies, highlighting and tackling entrenched forms of inequality and discrimination. The rise of such broad-based movements as #BlackLivesMatter or #Metoo (from 2013 and 2017, respectively) has been augmented by more specific initiatives in relation to race and racism. Of particular note has been the Rhodes Must Fall campaign at the University of Oxford and elsewhere, as well as wider calls to decolonise university curricula (Why is My Curriculum White?), usually targeted at specific disciplinary areas; indeed, these have had echoes outside of academia, such as the recent Twitter campaign #CharitySoWhite. Of course, this cannot fail to have influenced particular academic disciplines and Social Policy is not alone in urgently needing to come to terms with this challenge. The Royal Historical Society established an inquiry into racial and ethnic inequalities in the teaching and practice of History in the UK, resulting in its landmark ‘Race, ethnicity & equality report’ in late 2018 (RHS, 2018). Although this wider context has undoubtedly influenced the Social Policy Association (SPA) in its thinking on the topic, a more direct challenge was the difficulty in establishing a diverse sub-panel in the lead-up to Research Excellence Framework 2021 (REF2021). There was a notable absence of black and minority ethnic (BAME) academics coming forward and being endorsed for panel membership, as well as a shortage of academics with a central focus on race and ethnicity. It was also recognised that race and ethnicity were relatively absent from conferences and journals, and that SPA membership does not exactly model ethnic and other forms of diversity. Thus, as the beginning of a response, in 2018, the SPA commissioned an independent audit of the position of ‘race’ and ethnicity in Social Policy. The resulting report recognises various areas where teaching and learning in Social Policy could be diversified, as well as the role of the SPA in supporting a higher profile for journal articles, research and curriculum development (Craig et al, 2019). Of course, in many ways, this is only the start of the conversation.