News and Blog

The Sheffield Needs A Payrise (SNAP) research project follows the campaign of the same name and builds on the WISERD Spaces of New Localism Civil Society research project. It looks primarily into forms of grassroots, civil society and trade union working together to address issues of low pay and precariousness in work in Sheffield. SNAP…

Professor Sally Power, Director of WISERD Education, will today present new research on family arguments at an international childhood studies conference. This research is from the ESRC Civil Society centre research project ‘The intergenerational transmission of ‘civic virtues’: the role of the family in civil society engagement’. Professor Power’s presentation, entitled ‘Family Arguments: about what…

WISERD will have a strong presence at the International Society for Third Sector Research (ISTR) Conference (10-13 July) hosted by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Philanthropic Studies Department. Founded in 1992, the ISTR is the major international association promoting research and education in the fields of civil society, philanthropy, and the non-profit sector. It is committed to building…

WISERD Director Ian Rees Jones pays tribute to Julian Tudor Hart who passed away on 1st July.  It is a great sadness to hear the news of the death of Julian Tudor Hart.  Born in 1927, he studied medicine at Cambridge University and in London, graduating in 1952. Julian worked for 30 years as a…

Dr Peter Mackie, the Chair of WISERD’s housing research network, will today share findings from his research at an event on homelessness at Westminster. The panel discussion, ‘How can we tackle the homelessness crisis?’ is part of the Social Market Foundation and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)’s ‘Ask the Expert series’.  This event…

Strikes have taken place at McDonald’s and TGI Friday’s restaurants across the UK in recent months. These strikes are the first of their kind in the UK, instigated by a new generation of trade union members fighting for better pay and fairer working conditions.  At the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and…

Wales is in the process of developing a curriculum that is designed to transform the nature of teaching and learning in primary and secondary schools. The ‘Curriculum for wales’ – sometimes referred to simply as ‘Donaldson’ after the person who developed the proposals – is based on ‘ a brand new way of developing a…

Last Thursday I was invited to the French Senate, the second chamber, to contribute my thoughts on introducing territorial diversity into the French constitution, with a focus on drawing lessons from comparable European experiences.  The specific brief was to discuss how the UK government had managed to introduce Devolution almost two years ago. As with…

In 2017-18, a record number of people (1,575 in total) in the UK donated their organs after death, resulting in more than 5,000 life-saving or life-improving transplants. These figures, released by NHS Blood and Transplant, show numbers of deceased donors continue to rise in the UK. The 2017-18 figure was an 11% increase on the…

Rhys Davies reveals how official figures have under-estimated the presence of trade unions within UK workplaces over many years. This morning, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) published its latest estimates for trade union membership in the UK based upon data from the Labour Force Survey.  Today’s figures reveal that 6.2 million…