News and Blog

At the WISERD conference I talked about what people expect from an inspectorate of education and training in Wales and I outlined the methods that inspectors use to come to professional judgements about standards in education.  I also talked about standards in the education system and the challenges that continue to exist. Inspectorates offer public…

Last week the 6th Annual Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods (WISERD) Conference took place at Cardiff’s iconic Millennium Stadium. The WISERD Conference is the largest of its kind in Wales, and brings together practitioners, policy makers and social scientists to discuss and debate a range of topical themes such as health; social care; wellbeing;…

The concept of well-being is very slippery as it has many different meanings and applications. With politicians and governments increasingly using it as an adjudicating value for how policies should be formulated and implemented (including, most recently, the Welsh Government’s Social Services and Well-being Act 2014), it has become especially important to take a step back…

On May 21st 2015 Magnox announced that 1600 jobs would be lost across its 12 UK nuclear sites. This news came as no great surprise to the workforce at Wylfa on Anglesey, which has been facing decommission for the last few years. The timeline for the final decommission of the plant has stretched considerably, originally anticipated in 2012 and…

The Merthyr Rising 2015 festival is a three day event aimed at remembering the town’s radical past and promoting a positive image of the town’s future with a mixture of music, film, performance and debate. SCHeP were proud to take part in this year’s event by sponsoring and supporting the Waun Common Debates These debates were inspired…

How does attention to the Third Sector in Parties’ 2015 Westminster Election Manifestos compare to previous post-war ballots? Compared to issues like the economy, employment, education and health, the voluntary (or “third”) sector is not a topic that is likely to swing the results of a general election. That said, party pledges on the third…

In recent years the political, economic and social climate in which volunteering by older adults occurs has changed significantly, with the onset of an economic downturn, concern about pensions, a change in the public policy context for volunteering following a change of government, and the abolition of default retirement age. The notion of ‘unretirement’ is…

The All Wales Academic Social Care Research Collaboration (ASCC) is a three year programme funded by the National Institute for Social Care and Health Research (NISCHR). ASCC was developed in response to the Huxley (2009) report which identified a clear need for increased social care research capacity, and greater levels of collaboration between academics, social care policy makers and social…

Our lives, and the landscapes in which we live in, are storied in nature. These stories come in many different forms: from policy materials, census data, media reports, official documents and scholarly insight, to authorial fantasy. According to Piatti and Hurni (2011: 218), these stories form a ‘rich geographical layer’ that ‘hovers… above the physically…

On Monday 23rd March, 2015,  Jane Hutt AM, Minister for Finance and Government Business, officially launched the Administrative Data Research Centre Wales at an event at Swansea University. The Administrative Data Research Centre Wales, led by Swansea University’s College of Medicine in partnership with the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data & Methods (WISERD) at Cardiff University,…