Summary
This document is a working paper which highlights a number of major policy initiatives selected by the programme’s steering group for their impact on British children and childhood. It seeks to briefly capture the context in which these initiatives came about, their key elements, and reflections on their legacies.
It begins with an examination of the 1944 Education Act and details several other key moments in post-war policymaking, such as the Gillick Case on matters of consent in medical treatment, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and ending with the New Labour government’s Every Child Matters initiative.