The Latest Bulletin

Lying on the floor pretending to roar like a lion can do wonders for an elderly man's well-being. That's not a scientific fact, but it was one of the surprising and memorable moments we observed while making a television program which introduced a group of very young people with residents of a retirement village. The two episodes of Old People's Home for 4 Year Olds set out to explore the increasing isolation of older people within our communities. The impact of young children and older people sharing daytime care facilities has already been shown to be generally positive. But this was the first time an experiment was undertaken within the UK to measure the impact of inter-generational interaction on the health and happiness of the older group.…

The unsurprising yet still shocking BBC pay revelations of elite employees’ salaries give voice and substance to a pay gap that we know exists but to date has lacked a concrete sense of reality. Figures from the Office for National Statistics indicates a UK pay gap at 19.2% for full- and part-time workers, with women earning an average of 80 pence for every £1 earned by a man. The BBC’s publication of a top list of earners with household names we can all relate to, renders discrimination tangible and familiar. Making visible individual TV and broadcast celebrities’ annual salaries connects the UK license paying population to a clearly discriminatory hierarchy of pay. The highest earning female Claudia Winkelman’s substantial annual salary documented at £499,000…

Prison and jail staff and volunteers play an important role in facilitating visits and helping make visits a positive experience for children with incarcerated parents. Visits from family members can help promote strong family ties and have been shown to decrease recidivism. For children, visits are an important way to maintain the relationship with their incarcerated parent, which can have important implications on a child’s behavior and mental health. Staff and volunteers are the first and last individuals that children see in the facility; their support of family visits can set an important tone that parent-child relationships are valued and important. Click here to read more

In July 1967, the Sexual Offences Act 1967 partially decriminalised homosexuality in England and Wales. To mark the 50th anniversary of this seminal moment in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights, we highlight some of the key milestones for workplace protection against sexual orientation discrimination Click here to read more

 The following message has recently been sent to all Social Worker’s Union (SWU) members: A personal message from Neil Thompson I am delighted to be working with SWU to offer membership of my online learning programme at half price. It’s not a course in the conventional sense. Rather, it’s an online learning community, a place where people support each other in their learning. It’s based on principles of self-directed learning (the most effective type of learning) where you decide – with guidance and support – what you need to learn and how to learn. The Programme has a wide range of helpful facilities to promote reflective practice, including an e-portfolio for professional registration purposes. It is a sort of online…

'Learn from the past’ is an oft-quoted piece of wisdom. ‘Don’t look back, focus on the future’ is another one, despite the fact that the latter totally contradicts the former. So, where does that leave us? Well, as is often the case with slogan-type advice, they both oversimplify a complex situation. Time is something we generally take for granted as a common sense issue. However, philosophers have long debated the nature of time. For example, in a sense, there is no past or future, there is just the present moment. The past has gone and the future isn’t here yet. You could even argue that the future won’t come, because every day we wake up it is the present moment…

Reading, writing, arithmetic, and how to make friends and influence people: all in a day's learning at St Michael's Catholic Primary school in Sydney's Lane Cove. The school's Friendology program teaches kids how to make friends and how to put out "friendship fires", important skills they'll carry into adulthood. Parents and teachers say the children's social and emotional wellbeing is enhanced, they are performing better academically, and they are more likely to make smarter decisions in future relationships. Based on URSTRONG, an internationally recognised friendship program, Friendology empowers students in grades 1 to 6 with the skills, language, and self-confidence to be better friends and develop healthier relationships. Click here to read more

The Matthew Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices highlights the importance of effective worker voice for creating good work. We believe that having a meaningful voice is critical to better experience and outcomes of work, and therefore welcome Taylor’s inclusion of the CIPD’s viewpoint that ‘having a voice is essential not just at the moment of entering an employment relationship, but as it progresses, too.’ The review outlines several purposes of voice in the workplace, from raising concerns to influencing business decisions, and discusses the role of trade unions and Information and Consultation of Employees (ICE) regulations in employee representation. We know that voice has a positive impact on outcomes like employee engagement and job satisfaction, but the CIPD view…

Under-recognised chronic gynaecological health conditions are holding-back women’s productivity and could be damaging their career and earning potential. A new report launched by the Work Foundation highlights that women’s health conditions, such as endometriosis or infertility, having a long-term condition during pregnancy, and the experience of the menopause, are still considered taboo and are under-recognised in the workplace. Endometriosis, a chronic condition that affects one in ten women of reproductive age in the UK, is the second most common gynaecological condition. It occurs when cells similar to those lining the uterus grow elsewhere in the body and can cause symptoms such as excessively painful periods, chronic pelvis pain and fatigue. There is no cure and symptoms get worse with age. The symptoms…

Stop popping the balloons. Forget the dew on the grass. Bring back the conkers and the yo-yos. And ditch those hi-vis jackets that make every child look like Bob the Builder. It’s time, says the chief inspector of schools, to blast the bugles, sound the trumpets and chuck out the cotton wool. It’s time, in fact, to set the children of this nation free. Perhaps she didn’t mention bugles, but at the weekend, Amanda Spielman did mention the “dew on the grass” that had led to a cancelled sports day, and the conkers, yo-yos and the potentially too dangerous balloons that were being snatched from children’s childhoods, along, she implied, with their human rights. There had, she said, been “an over-zealous approach to…