The question of when a child is old enough to be left at home alone, and under what circumstances, is a dilemma faced by many parents and professionals. Adopting a social constructionist perspective of social problems, this thesis explores professional perceptions and policy responses to the issue of children left at home alone since the passing of the Children Act in 1989. The law in England and Wales does not specify an age at which it is deemed safe to leave a child unsupervised at home, a practice sometimes referred to as 'self-care'. Professionals respond to the issue through non-legalistic, more persuasive interventions. The media also plays a role in regulating parenting practices, as demonstrated in the early 1990s, when the British press covered a number of stories involving parents who left their children at 'home alone'. The issue continues to bubble up from time to time, but calls for more specific law to manage the problem have gone unheeded. Drawing on interviews with child welfare professionals and campaigners who work at national level, and on an analysis of policy, campaigning and educational documents, I explore how the issue is constructed, responded to and resisted as a social problem. I conclude that this is an example of an 'unconstructed' social problem because, despite continued public and professional concern, there has been no clear legislative response. Understanding how and why some social problems 'fail' is a key contribution to the literature on the social construction of social problems, which has focused mainly on 'successful' social problems to date.

This research uses a novel policy writing method to explore young people’s subjective understandings of the problems of poverty. Working with five groups of young people, aged 11 – 21, from some of the most financially deprived areas of England, it sought to draw out and explore their “policy imaginary”, or the way they viewed the problems of poverty through a lens of ideal policy responses. It unpacks these young people’s policy imaginaries, and the life-narratives they discussed alongside these imaginaries, within a discourse of individualisation. Across four articles, it demonstrates and explores the complexities and ambiguities of these young people’s thinkings. This thesis begins by suggesting that many of the problems of poverty they identify as important to their lives are structural, and that they understanding the role of collective and political agency, rather than their own individual agency, in ending poverty. It then more specifically explores their understandings of their neighbourhoods and houses, which suggests that individualised factors often identified in other research, such as social contagion and epidemic neighbourhood effects, are not what they identify as most important in their local areas. It concludes by identifying a policy gap emerging along similar theoretical lines. Here, this research suggests that much of the policy directed towards these young people focuses on individualised problems, and their individual agency as a route of out poverty, but that this sort of policy response is not what these young people felt was needed. However, this is not to suggest that these young people downplayed or dismissed their own agency in charting their life-pathways. Indeed, as much previous literature has found, these young people spoke fluently about the agency and opportunities they have in their lives, often seeming ‘hyper-agentic’. However, this thesis suggests that exploring these young people’s policy imaginary appears to create a medium through which they can talk both about their agency and the constraints and limitations low-incomes generate. It allowed them to bridge their highly agentic biographies to their socially structured histories, as they saw them.

1. This research study examines aspects of the effectiveness of the Every ChildlYouth Matters (ECMIYM) programme with regard to its implementation in 2006. Part 1 of the study explores the practical implications of ECM/YM for professional practice across the different welfare agencies, through a series of loosely structured interviews with managers, case workers and young offenders (aged up to 16 years). From an analysis of the data, using grounded theory approaches, three key findings were inducted. These findings suggested the following: I. A lack of consistency in the quality of targeted support provided by integrated services for the most vulnerable children and young people and their families; II. A lack of fine tuning in: a) the identification of vulnerability across different cohorts of children and young people, according to their changing circumstances; b) the ways in which information (about vulnerable children and young people) is shared and used across the different welfare agencies. 2. Reflection on these findings led to a further review of the literature that focuses on critiques of social policy. The analyses of research data within this domain suggest the limitations of social policy making that conforms to a linear, mechanistic approach, because it does not respond to individualised, local need. This suggests further that it is the policies themselves that account for the perceived lack of fine tuning identified in the above findings in part one of this research thesis. Therefore it was important, next, to capture data which drew on respondents' personal perceptions of welfare provision, which might endorse, or otherwise, those aspects in which part 1 of the study suggested that the ECM/YM agenda is failing, in some localities, to meet the needs of the most vulnerable children, young people and their families. 3. In part two of this study, further research was conducted through a series , of extended conversations with: male offenders (aged between 16 and 24 years); parents/partners of prisoners; managers from voluntary/not for profit organisations and senior multi-agency professionals. The data were analysed using a phenomenological approach. Overall, the findings suggest that a purely mechanistic, evidenced-based approach to providing welfare support for vulnerable children, young people and their families can result in negative outcomes when compared with a more contextualised, holistic approach.