Last Updated on August 15, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Social policies are the laws and welfare measures governments use to shape family life. For A-level sociology you need to know four things:
- What the main UK policies are, and when they came in — from the 1969 Divorce Act through to the abolition of the two-child limit in April 2026.
- How each policy affects family life — marriage and divorce rates, family diversity, equality between men and women, and the position of children.
- What each perspective says about state intervention — Functionalism, Marxism, Feminism, the New Right, and Donzelot’s conflict view.
- How family policy varies internationally, which gives you evaluation material no textbook example will.
Social policy is one of the larger topics within the families and households module, taught in the first year of A-level sociology and examined on Paper 2 (7192/2).
What is social policy?
Social policy refers to the plans and actions of state agencies — health and social services, the welfare benefits system, schools, and other bodies. Policies are usually based on laws introduced by governments which set the framework those agencies work within. A law lays down who is entitled to a particular benefit; the agency then administers it.
Most social policies affect families in some way. Some are aimed directly at families: laws governing marriage and divorce, abortion and contraception, child protection and adoption. Others are not designed with families in mind but shape family life anyway — policies on childcare, education, housing and crime, and above all changes to taxation and benefits.
That distinction is worth holding onto, because it is where a lot of marks live. The 1969 Divorce Act was aimed squarely at family life. The 1970 Equal Pay Act was not, but by improving women’s economic position it arguably did more to change the balance of power inside marriages than any policy explicitly about the family.
There are many policies which have affected family life over the years, so what follows is necessarily selective. It covers the ones examiners expect you to know.
Marriage and divorce policies
The best-known is the 1969 Divorce Act, which made divorce far easier to obtain. Since then the main direction of travel has been equalising marriage for same-sex couples, raising the legal age of marriage from 16 to 18, and — most recently — removing fault from the divorce process altogether.
The 1969 Divorce Reform Act
Before 1969, one partner had to prove the other was ‘at fault’ to be granted a divorce. Following the Divorce Reform Act 1969, a marriage could be ended if it had irretrievably broken down, and neither partner had to prove fault. If only one partner wanted a divorce they still had to wait five years from the date of marriage. In 1984 that was changed so a divorce could be granted within one year of marriage.
The Act is the standard example of a policy driving a measurable change in family life: the divorce rate roughly doubled in the years immediately after it came into force.
The Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020 — ‘no-fault divorce’
This is the most important recent change to divorce law and it is missing from most revision notes, so knowing it is worth marks. The Act received Royal Assent in June 2020 and came into force on 6 April 2022. It removed the requirement to establish one of the five ‘facts’ (adultery, unreasonable behaviour, desertion, two years’ separation with consent, five years’ separation without). A sole applicant or both partners jointly now simply state that the marriage has broken down irretrievably.
It is no longer possible to contest a divorce except on narrow grounds such as jurisdiction, and there is a minimum period of twenty weeks between the start of proceedings and the application for a conditional order.
Two evaluation points follow. Liberal Feminists read this as a straightforward gain: women initiate the majority of divorces, and removing the need to make allegations about a partner’s conduct reduces the risk and the cost of leaving. The New Right read the same reform as further weakening the commitment marriage is supposed to represent. Both readings are available to you, and saying so explicitly is analysis rather than description.
The Civil Partnership Act 2004
The Civil Partnership Act 2004 gave same-sex couples rights and responsibilities similar to those in a civil marriage, and was introduced by the New Labour government. Civil partners gained the same property rights, exemptions on inheritance tax, social security and pension benefits as married couples, along with parental responsibility for a partner’s children, maintenance, tenancy rights, insurance and next-of-kin rights in hospital.
There were 60,938 same-sex civil partnerships formed between 2004 and 2013, running at around 6,500 a year after an initial spike. From 2013 the annual number dropped below 1,000, reflecting the fact that same-sex couples could now marry on the same basis as opposite-sex couples.
Since 2019 opposite-sex couples can also enter civil-partnerships and in 2021 6000 couples did so, but these numbers may be lower because of Covid-19 restrictions on social gatherings.
The Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act 2014
This Act allows same-sex couples to marry in England and Wales on the same basis as opposite-sex couples, and to convert existing civil partnerships into marriages. It also provided religious protections — no religious organisation is compelled to conduct same-sex marriages — and allowed for a change of legal gender within an existing marriage.
ONS data suggests same-sex couples prefer marriage to civil partnership. Same-sex couples made up 0.9% of all married couples in 2025.
The Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Act 2022
This Act raised the minimum age of marriage and civil partnership in England and Wales to 18. It received Royal Assent in April 2022 and came into force on 27 February 2023. Previously 16 and 17 year olds could marry with parental consent.
Since then it has been an offence to cause a child under 18 to enter a marriage, carrying a sentence of up to seven years, and the offence covers non-legally-binding ceremonies as well as legal marriages. The reform is usually presented as a child protection measure aimed at forced marriage, which makes it a good example of a policy that reduces individual freedom in order to protect a vulnerable group — exactly the tension Donzelot is interested in.
Maternity, paternity and parental leave
New mothers in the UK are entitled to 52 weeks of statutory maternity leave, 39 weeks of which is paid, at two different rates:
- The first six weeks are paid at 90% of average weekly earnings.
- The next 33 weeks are paid at £194.32 per week (2026/27 rate) or 90% of average weekly earnings, whichever is lower.
- Any remaining leave, up to 52 weeks, is unpaid.
Fathers and partners are entitled to two weeks of paternity leave, paid at the same flat rate of £194.32 per week or 90% of average weekly earnings, whichever is lower.
Since 2015 parents can also apply for up to 50 weeks of Shared Parental Leave, up to 37 weeks of which are paid. For this to work the mother must give up part of her maternity leave and swap it for shared leave — it is not additional leave for the father, which is one reason take-up has remained low.
The gap between 39 weeks paid for mothers and two weeks for fathers is the single most useful statistic in this topic for a Feminist answer. It is a policy that assumes the mother is the primary carer, and in assuming it, helps make it true.
The Employment Protection Act 1975
Social responsibility for women’s health during childbearing was first recognised through the 1911 National Insurance Act, which included a maternity benefit and a one-off grant of 30 shillings for insured women.
Many women were still routinely sacked for becoming pregnant into the late 1970s. The UK’s first maternity leave legislation came with the Employment Protection Act 1975 — but for the first eighteen years, until 1993, only around half of working women qualified because of long service requirements. The Act was amended in 1993 so that all pregnant women received a minimum of fourteen weeks’ statutory maternity leave regardless of prior employment.
Paternity policies
In 2003 male employees received paid statutory paternity leave for the first time, an entitlement extended in 2010. Under the 2010 arrangements, additional paternity leave allowed the father or the mother’s partner to take up to 26 weeks’ leave after the mother’s first 26 weeks if she returned to work, effectively taking her place at home. It has been unlawful throughout to dismiss or select for redundancy a pregnant employee for reasons connected with her pregnancy.
Day-one rights from April 2026
The Employment Rights Act 2025 made two changes that took effect on 6 April 2026:
- Paternity leave became a day-one right. The previous requirement of 26 weeks’ continuous service was abolished. It applies where the expected week of childbirth begins on or after 5 April 2026, or the child is born on or after 6 April 2026.
- Unpaid parental leave — up to 18 weeks per child up to age 18 — also became a day-one right, replacing the previous one-year qualifying period.
The Act also removed the odd rule that prevented an employee from taking paternity leave after taking shared parental leave. Separately, the Bereaved Partner’s Paternity Leave Regulations 2026 extended paternity leave to up to 52 weeks where the child’s mother or primary adopter dies within a year of the birth or placement.
HOWEVER — and this is the evaluation point — the day-one right applies to leave, not to pay. Statutory paternity pay still requires 26 weeks’ service. A father who has just started a job can now take the two weeks, but may have to take them unpaid. Whether the reform improves the domestic division of labour depends entirely on whether fathers can afford to use it.
Childcare policy
Childcare is the fastest-moving area of family policy and the one most likely to appear as contemporary evidence in an exam answer.
England has been rolling out an expansion of government-funded childcare in stages:
- April 2024 — eligible two-year-olds gained 15 hours a week.
- September 2024 — eligible children gained 15 hours a week from nine months old.
- September 2025 — the entitlement rose to 30 hours a week (1,140 hours a year) for eligible working parents, from nine months until the child starts school.
Eligibility requires each parent to earn at least the equivalent of 16 hours a week at the National Living Wage, with neither earning more than £100,000 adjusted net income.
Two evaluations. Liberal Feminists point out that childcare cost is the practical barrier keeping mothers out of full-time work, so subsidising it does more for gender equality than most policies aimed explicitly at the family. Critics note that the entitlement is targeted at working parents, which means the families with the lowest incomes and the weakest labour market attachment — the ones whose children would benefit most from early education — get the least. That is a policy which redistributes upwards, and it is a good Marxist point.
Child benefit and Universal Credit
The Child Benefit Act 1975
The 1975 Act introduced a universal payment for each child for the first time. The rate was £1 a week for the first child and £1.50 for each subsequent child, with an additional 50p for lone-parent families.
Child benefit rose with inflation until 1998, when New Labour increased the first-child rate by more than 20% and abolished the lone-parent rate. Rates rose with inflation again until 2010, then were frozen for several years.
The universal principle ended on 7 January 2013, when child benefit became effectively means-tested through the High Income Child Benefit Charge (HICBC) — a tax charge clawing the benefit back from higher earners.
Child Benefit in 2026
In 2024 everyone with children receives child benefit payments in the following amounts:
- £25.60 a week for the first child
- £16.95 a week for each subsequent child.
- There is no limit to the number of children parents will receive child benefit for.
These payments are awarded for children up to the age 16 and up to age of 20 if they stay on in further or higher education.
They are payable to everyone whether working or in receipt of Universal Credit and the payments are in addition to the child payment part of universal credit.
However, for those earning £50 000 or more a year, they pay additional taxes: a ‘child tax credit charge’ which recoups some of the money received in child benefit, and for those earning £60K a year, they pay so much this cancels out the entire amount they will receive in child benefit.
From 6 April 2026 child benefit is paid at:
- £27.05 a week for the first child
- £17.90 a week for each additional child
There is no limit to the number of children a family can claim for. Payments run until a child is 16, or 20 if they stay in further or higher education, and are paid whether or not the family is working or receiving Universal Credit.
The HICBC thresholds were raised in April 2024 and are now frozen at £60,000 to £80,000. The higher earner in the household repays 1% of the annual child benefit for every £200 of adjusted net income above £60,000, so the benefit is fully clawed back at £80,000.
The HICBC is a useful example of a policy with an unintended consequence a student can evaluate: it is assessed on the higher individual earner, not household income. A couple each earning £59,000 — £118,000 between them — pay nothing. A single earner on £80,000 loses the lot. A policy justified as targeting support at those who need it therefore penalises single-earner households, which are disproportionately those with a parent at home. The New Right would call that a policy that punishes the traditional family.
Universal Credit
Universal Credit was introduced in 2013, replacing income support, housing benefit, working tax credit and child tax credit with a single payment. All remaining legacy benefits, including child tax credit, ended by 5 April 2025.
The stated aim was to remove the ‘perverse incentives’ in the old system. Under the previous rules a claimant could end up worse off working more than 16 hours a week, because Jobseeker’s Allowance would stop and housing benefit would be lost. Universal Credit tapers the award as earnings rise rather than withdrawing it at a cliff edge.
For 2026/27 the monthly child amounts are:
- £351.88 for a first child born before 6 April 2017
- £303.94 for a first child born on or after 6 April 2017, and for each subsequent child
The benefit cap limits total household benefits to £22,020 a year outside London and £25,323 a year in London for couples and lone parents with children.
The abolition of the two-child limit, April 2026
This is the most significant change to family policy in a decade and it deserves a paragraph of its own in any answer on this topic.
The two-child limit, announced in 2015 and in force from April 2017, meant families received no Universal Credit child element for a third or subsequent child born on or after 6 April 2017, with narrow exceptions for multiple births and kinship care. It was explicitly justified on the grounds that families on benefits should face the same financial decisions about having children as families supporting themselves through work — a New Right argument, made almost word for word.
The Chancellor announced its abolition in the Budget of 26 November 2025, and the Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Act 2026 removed it from April 2026. Families now receive the child element for every child in the household.
The scale is worth quoting:
- Around 483,000 families in the UK were affected by the limit in April 2025.
- The government’s impact assessment expects around 480,000 households to benefit in 2026/27, gaining the full child element of roughly £3,650 a year per previously excluded child.
- It projects around 450,000 fewer children in relative poverty after housing costs by 2030/31.
- 59% of the families affected were in work — which cuts directly against the assumption that the policy targeted worklessness.
HOWEVER, the benefit cap remains in place, and the government’s own assessment estimates around 70,000 families will not see the full increase because the cap absorbs it. A policy can be reversed on paper and still be limited in practice by another policy left standing.
This is close to a controlled experiment on the New Right’s central claim. Charles Murray argued that welfare payments for children create perverse incentives. The two-child limit was that argument made law. It ran for nine years and the evidence that it changed fertility decisions was weak, while the evidence that it deepened child poverty was strong enough for a government to reverse it. If you can use that in an essay, you are evaluating with contemporary evidence rather than reciting a textbook criticism from 1984.
The Adoption and Children Act 2002
In 2005, under New Labour, changes to adoption law under the Adoption and Children Act 2002 came into force, giving unmarried couples — including same-sex couples — the right to adopt on the same basis as married couples.
Sociological perspectives on social policy and the family
The two grids below summarise what family policies each perspective supports or criticises. The sections underneath go into much more depth.
The Functionalist view of social policy and the family
Functionalists see society as built on harmony and consensus rather than conflict. They see the state as acting in the interests of society as a whole, and its social policies as being for the good of everyone. Policies help families perform their functions more effectively and make life better for their members.
Ronald Fletcher: the march of progress
Ronald Fletcher (1966) is the key Functionalist name on this topic. In The Family and Marriage in Britain he argued that the introduction of health, education and housing policies since the industrial revolution has gradually produced a welfare state which supports the family in carrying out its functions more effectively, rather than replacing it.
His example is the National Health Service. The family retains its responsibility for caring for sick members, but with doctors, nurses, hospitals and medicines behind it, it discharges that responsibility far better than a Victorian family could. State provision does not take the function away from the family; it props the family up while it performs it.
Fletcher’s position is usually called the ‘march of progress’ view: policy has improved family life steadily over time, and the direction of travel is upward. Applied to the twenty-first century, a Fletcher-style argument would point to funded childcare from nine months, day-one paternity rights, and the removal of the two-child limit as three more steps along the same road.
Criticisms of the Functionalist perspective
- It assumes all members of a family benefit equally from social policy. Feminists argue policies often benefit men more than women — 39 weeks of paid maternity leave against two weeks of paternity leave being the obvious case.
- It assumes a march of progress. Policy does not only move forward. The two-child limit ran from 2017 to 2026 and made a large group of families measurably poorer. Fletcher’s model has no good account of a policy that goes backwards.
- It ignores the possibility that state support is also state control, which is Donzelot’s argument below.
The Marxist view of social policy and the family
Marxists see the state as serving the interests of the capitalist class, and social policy as a means of maintaining a workforce at the lowest sustainable cost while keeping social conflict manageable.
On this reading, family policy performs two functions for capitalism. It reproduces labour power — policies on maternity leave, childcare and education produce the next generation of workers, at the family’s expense rather than the employer’s. And it legitimises inequality, because a welfare state that provides just enough makes the underlying distribution of wealth look tolerable.
The childcare expansion is a good Marxist case study. Its stated purpose is to get parents, mostly mothers, into paid work. That is presented as a gender equality measure; a Marxist would point out that it also increases the supply of labour, which suppresses wages, and that the eligibility rules exclude precisely those families who are not already supplying labour.
Evaluation: Marxism is often criticised as too economistic here. It struggles to explain policies with no obvious benefit to capital — same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, raising the minimum age of marriage — except by treating them as concessions, which risks being unfalsifiable.
The Feminist view of social policy and the family
Liberal Feminists argue that reforms such as equal pay legislation and increasingly generous maternity provision are sufficient, over time, to bring about gender equality. On their account the following policies have already made a substantial difference:
- The 1969 Divorce Act gave women the ability to leave unhappy marriages on an equal footing with men, and was followed by a sharp rise in divorce — the majority of petitions being brought by women.
- The 1970 Equal Pay Act (in force 1975) was an important step towards women’s economic independence from men.
- Increasingly generous maternity cover and pay made it easier for women to have children and return to work.
- The September 2025 childcare expansion removes what is, in practice, the largest single barrier to mothers returning to full-time work.
Radical Feminists argue that patriarchy is too entrenched for policy change alone to deliver equality, and that reforms often leave the underlying structure intact:
- There is limited evidence of the ‘new man’ doing a fair share of domestic work. Women have acquired a dual burden of paid work and unpaid housework, and the family remains patriarchal — men benefit from both women’s earnings and their domestic labour.
- Duncombe and Marsden (1995) argue women carry a triple shift: paid work, domestic work, and emotion work, the emotional labour of holding a household together. Emotion work is far harder to measure than hours of housework, which is itself a methodological point worth making.
- Some Feminists argue that generous maternity provision set against minimal paternity provision actively reinforces the assumption that women should be the primary carer. A policy intended to help women can entrench the very division of labour that disadvantages them.
- Class cuts across gender here. Working-class mothers are worse affected because they cannot afford to buy childcare, and the childcare entitlement’s work requirement excludes many of them.
- Domestic violence remains a limit on how far policy can reach into private life. Older British Crime Survey estimates put the proportion of women experiencing domestic violence at around a quarter, and many are reluctant to leave a partner regardless of what the law permits. (See the statistics log — this figure comes from a 1990s source and should be replaced with a current ONS Crime Survey estimate.)
Donzelot: policing the family
Jacques Donzelot is a French sociologist, best known for The Policing of Families (1977). He takes a conflict view of society and sees social policy as a form of state power and control exercised over families.
Is Donzelot a Marxist?
No — and this is the answer examiners are looking for. Donzelot is not a Marxist, although he shares with Marxism a conflict view of society and a scepticism about whether state policy serves everyone equally.
The difference is where power is located. Marxists locate power in the ownership of the means of production: the state acts in the interests of the capitalist class, and policy ultimately serves capital. Donzelot draws instead on Michel Foucault, who sees power not as something held by a ruling class but as diffused throughout society and present in all relationships. Power on this account operates through professional knowledge — doctors, social workers and health visitors exercising authority over their clients by turning them into ‘cases’ to be managed.
That is why Marxists criticise Donzelot: he identifies surveillance and control, but does not say clearly who benefits. For a Marxist, an analysis of power that cannot name the beneficiary is incomplete.
Donzelot is best described as taking a conflict or post-structuralist view, influenced by Foucault. If a question asks you to place him, say conflict theorist, note the Foucauldian influence, and say explicitly that he is not a Marxist and why. That distinction is itself worth analysis marks.
Is Donzelot a Functionalist?
No — he is close to the opposite. Donzelot explicitly rejects the Functionalist ‘march of progress’ view. Where Fletcher sees the growth of health, education and welfare services as a story of steady improvement in family life, Donzelot sees the same growth as the extension of state supervision into the private sphere.
The same expansion of the welfare state, on the two accounts, is either support or surveillance. Fletcher sees a family helped to do its job; Donzelot sees a family increasingly required to do its job in the way professionals think it should. Setting these two directly against each other is one of the most efficient evaluation moves available in this topic.
The policing of families
Donzelot applies Foucault’s concept of surveillance — observing and monitoring — to family life. He is interested in how professionals carry out surveillance of families. Social workers, health visitors, teachers and doctors use their expert knowledge to control and change families, and Donzelot calls this ‘the policing of families’.
Crucially, surveillance is not targeted equally across social classes. Poor families are far more likely to be identified as ‘problem families’ and treated as the source of crime and anti-social behaviour. These are the families professionals target for ‘improvement’. A middle-class family and a working-class family with identical difficulties are not equally likely to attract a social work referral.
Rachel Condry (2007) provides a concrete British example. The state may seek to regulate family life by imposing compulsory Parenting Orders through the courts. Parents of young offenders, truants, or badly behaved children can be required to attend parenting classes to learn the ‘correct’ way to bring up children — the correct way being defined by the professionals delivering the class.
By focusing on the micro level, on how the caring professions act as agents of social control, Donzelot shows that professional knowledge is itself a form of power. Social policy on this account does not straightforwardly create a better society; it oppresses particular kinds of family while presenting itself as help.
How relevant is Donzelot today?
Very. Almost every current mechanism of family policy fits his model.
Conditionality is the clearest case. Universal Credit ties income to compliance with a claimant commitment monitored by a work coach — an official with the power to sanction. The 30-hour childcare entitlement requires parents to demonstrate their earnings and reconfirm eligibility every three months. Neither is presented as surveillance; both require families to make themselves legible to the state in order to be supported.
Child protection is Donzelot’s own territory and has expanded considerably since 1977, through multi-agency safeguarding arrangements which pool information about families across schools, health services and police. So has data: predictive analytics is now used by some local authorities to identify families at risk, which is professional classification of ‘problem families’ carried out at scale by algorithm.
And the class pattern he identified persists. DWP figures for 2024/25 put 4.0 million children in relative poverty after housing costs — 27% of all children, with 72% of them in working families and 2.8 million in deep poverty. Poverty on that scale is precisely the condition under which families come to official attention, and it is not distributed evenly.
Evaluation: critics argue Donzelot overstates social control and underestimates family agency — families are not passive recipients of professional definition, and many actively seek help from the services he describes as controlling. His account also gives limited attention to how class, gender and ethnicity intersect in determining which families are surveilled. And there is a straightforward Functionalist reply: some families genuinely do harm children, and a state that declined to intervene would not be respecting privacy so much as abandoning the vulnerable.
The New Right and social policy
The New Right have had considerable influence on government thinking about family policy. They see the traditional nuclear family — with a division of labour between a male provider and a female homemaker — as self-reliant and capable of caring for its own members. Social policy should therefore avoid doing anything that undermines this natural self-reliance.
They criticise many existing policies for weakening the family, arguing that overly generous welfare benefits erode its independence.
Charles Murray and ‘perverse incentives’
Charles Murray (1984), writing in Losing Ground, argues that welfare benefits create perverse incentives — they reward irresponsible or anti-social behaviour:
- If fathers see the state will maintain their children, some will abandon their responsibilities.
- Providing council housing to unmarried teenage mothers encourages young women to become pregnant.
- The growth of lone-parent families encouraged by generous benefits means more boys grow up without a male role model and authority figure, which Murray links to rising crime among young men.
Policies the New Right supports
- Cuts in welfare benefits and tighter eligibility restrictions, to remove perverse incentives — the two-child limit being the clearest recent example.
- Policies supporting the traditional nuclear family, such as tax arrangements favouring married couples over cohabiting couples.
- The Child Support Agency, and its successor the Child Maintenance Service, whose role is to make absent fathers pay for their children.
Criticisms of the New Right
- Feminists argue these policies amount to an attempt to justify a return to the traditional nuclear family, an arrangement which subordinates women.
- Cutting benefits may simply drive families into poverty, producing the social problems the policy claimed to prevent. The two-child limit is the test case: it did not measurably change fertility decisions, and the majority of the families it affected were in work.
- Murray’s account assumes people calculate family decisions around benefit rules. The evidence for that is thin, and it looks less like a description of behaviour than a moral judgement about the poor.
New Labour and family policy
New Labour was in power from 1997 to 2010. Three things are worth knowing.
They were more favourable to family diversity than the New Right. The Civil Partnership Act 2004 gave same-sex couples similar rights to married heterosexual couples, and the 2005 adoption changes gave unmarried and same-sex couples the right to adopt on the same basis as married couples.
They were less concerned about ‘perverse incentives’ than the New Right. Despite claiming to want to reduce welfare dependency, they prioritised children’s wellbeing, ensuring that long-term unemployed families and single mothers had adequate housing and income.
They believed in more state intervention in family life. They took a positive view of intervention as a way of improving families’ lives. In June 2007 they created the Department for Children, Schools and Families — the first time a British government department had ‘family’ in its title. Its stated aim was that every child should get the best possible start in life with the ongoing support and protection they and their families need, with responsibilities spanning school standards, child wellbeing and protection, child health including obesity, and young people’s contribution to their communities.
For Donzelot, this is the perfect illustration of his argument. A department for the family sounds like support, and was intended as support. It is also an institutional apparatus for defining what a family ought to be doing and monitoring whether it is doing it.
Comparing the perspectives
| Perspective | View of the state and social policy | View of the family | Main criticism |
|---|---|---|---|
| Functionalist (Fletcher) | State supports the family and promotes stability; a march of progress | The family performs vital functions for society | Overlooks power, conflict and inequality |
| Marxist | State supports capitalism through policy | The family reproduces labour power and ideology | Too economistic; struggles with non-economic reforms |
| Feminist | State reflects patriarchy and gender bias | The family is a site of gender oppression | Can neglect class and intersectionality |
| New Right (Murray) | Minimal state; policy should encourage self-reliance | The nuclear family is the ideal | Ignores diversity; blames poverty on the poor |
| Donzelot (conflict / Foucauldian) | State governs families through welfare and surveillance | The family is a site of regulation | Risks overstating control; doesn’t say who benefits |
Social policy and the family in global context
Family policy is not the same everywhere, and international comparison is one of the strongest sources of evaluation available on this topic. If a policy that seems natural in Britain is absent or reversed elsewhere, that policy is a choice rather than a necessity — which is a sociological point in itself.
This section is also relevant to the beliefs in society module, since several of the variations below follow religious traditions, and to globalisation and global development.
Marriage and partnership policies
Some states actively promote marriage. Singapore gives married couples priority for public housing, making marriage the practical route into affordable accommodation. United States federal tax rules include a ‘marriage bonus’ under which some couples pay less tax filing jointly.
Legal recognition of diverse partnerships has spread, largely through global human rights discourse: same-sex marriage is now legal in more than thirty countries, including South Africa (2006), Taiwan (2019) and Chile (2022). Other states recognise civil partnerships without full marriage rights, and many resist recognition altogether on religious or cultural grounds.
Marriage rates are falling almost everywhere. UK marriage rates reached record lows in the 2010s. In China, marriages fell by around 44% between 2013 and 2022, linked to economic insecurity and changing attitudes. Governments worry about this mainly where marriage is tied to fertility.
Divorce policies
Most countries now allow some form of no-fault divorce, though the timing varies enormously — Spain and Italy only introduced it in the late twentieth century, and England and Wales in 2022.
Some countries still restrict it sharply. The Philippines prohibits divorce entirely except under Islamic law. Malta only legalised it in 2011. The people most affected by restrictive regimes are victims of domestic abuse, mainly women, who cannot leave a marriage through any legal route.
As divorce becomes easier, lone-parent families increase. Around 15% of children in OECD countries live in lone-parent households, which raises child poverty risk and makes child maintenance enforcement a central policy concern.
Adoption, surrogacy and assisted reproduction
International adoption peaked in the early 2000s at over 40,000 adoptions a year and has since fallen below 15,000, largely because of tighter regulation under the Hague Convention. China and Ethiopia both restricted foreign adoption over exploitation concerns.
Commercial surrogacy is legal in some countries and not others, generating ‘reproductive tourism’. India and Thailand both banned foreign commercial surrogacy in 2015 after concerns about the exploitation of surrogate mothers. Israel has some of the world’s most generous IVF provision, funding unlimited cycles up to two children, while many countries restrict or prohibit IVF on religious grounds.
These policies show a tension the UK debate rarely surfaces: between individual reproductive rights, religious belief, and the risk that a global market in reproduction transfers bodily risk from wealthy women to poor ones.
Child welfare policies
Most countries have legal frameworks for safeguarding children, and globalisation has increased cooperation through the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), ratified by almost every country.
Provision varies widely. Nordic states provide generous universal child allowances and have correspondingly low child poverty. UK child benefit is modest and clawed back from higher earners. Many lower-income countries deliver child support through conditional cash transfers — Brazil’s Bolsa Família and Mexico’s Prospera being the best-known — where payment depends on parents keeping children in school and attending health checks. Those conditions are Donzelot’s argument operating at national scale in the global South.
Population policies
Demographic anxiety now drives a great deal of family policy.
Pro-natalist policies aim to raise birth rates in ageing societies. Hungary offers lifetime income tax exemption to women with four or more children. Japan subsidises childcare and fertility treatment, though fertility remains below 1.4. China ended its one-child policy in 2016 and now actively promotes three-child families — a complete reversal within a decade.
Anti-natalist policies persist where population growth is rapid. Family planning programmes in Bangladesh and Ethiopia have reduced fertility substantially through contraceptive provision and girls’ education.
Migration policy is increasingly used as demographic policy. Canada and Australia use immigration to offset low fertility and an ageing population, which reshapes family forms transnationally and produces the transnational families sociologists now study.
What the global picture shows
Three themes run through all of this. Convergence and divergence — globalisation spreads ideas about human rights and gender equality, but national culture, religion and politics still determine what actually gets legislated. Inequality — wealthier states can afford generous family support; poorer ones depend on aid or restrict provision. State versus market — families are shaped not only by welfare states but by private markets in childcare, fertility treatment and care work.
The Hungarian example is the one to remember for an essay. A government paying women to have four children in order to avoid relying on immigration is family policy, population policy and immigration policy at once. It is also a straightforwardly New Right project: pro-natalist, pro-traditional-family, and explicitly opposed to family diversity.
Summary grids
Global family policies by area
| Policy area | Typical state approaches | Global examples | Key challenges |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marriage and partnerships | Promote marriage; recognise diverse unions | Singapore (housing priority for married couples); same-sex marriage legal in 30+ countries | Declining marriage rates; cultural and religious resistance |
| Divorce and separation | Liberalise divorce law; regulate custody | UK: no-fault divorce (2022); Philippines: divorce prohibited | Lone-parent poverty; enforcing child maintenance |
| Adoption and reproduction | Regulate adoption, surrogacy and IVF access | Israel: generous IVF; Ukraine: commercial surrogacy; China: restrictions on international adoption | Exploitation risk; unequal access |
| Child welfare | Child benefits, education, protection law | Nordic states: universal child benefits; Brazil: Bolsa Família | Poverty reduction; protection in low-income states |
| Population | Pro-natalist, anti-natalist or migration-based | Hungary: tax breaks for large families; China: three-child policy; Bangladesh: family planning | Ageing societies against rapid population growth |
Global trends shaping family policy
| Trend | Effect on families | Policy response | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fertility decline | Smaller families, ageing populations | Pro-natalist incentives, childcare support | Japan: childcare subsidies; Hungary: lifetime tax exemption for mothers of four or more |
| Migration | Transnational families, remittances, care gaps | Immigration policy, migrant rights | Canada: points-based immigration; Gulf states: restrictions on family reunification |
| Globalisation of rights | Spread of equality norms | Expansion of marriage and adoption rights | Taiwan (2019): same-sex marriage legalised |
| Economic insecurity | Delayed marriage and parenthood, lower fertility | Family allowances, conditional cash transfers | Mexico: Prospera; UK: child benefit |
| Ageing populations | Rising elder care burden | Pensions, social care policy | South Korea: elder allowances, community care reform |
How UK social policy has affected family life
These grids cover twelve policies and how each affects marriage and divorce, family diversity, gender equality, children, and the traditional nuclear family. They are designed for revision — work through the columns rather than reading them.
[IMAGE: retain existing social-policy-and-the-family-1.png — grid covering 1969 to 2004. Alt text: “Grid summarising how UK social policy affected family life 1969 to 2004, for A-level sociology”]
[IMAGE: retain existing social-policy-and-the-family-2-1.png — grid covering 2013 to present. Alt text: “Grid summarising how UK social policy has affected family life since 2013, for A-level sociology”]
When you use these grids, ask four questions of every policy:
- What did it do to marriage, divorce and family diversity?
- What did it do to equality between men and women in relationships?
- What did it do to children?
- Does it support or undermine the traditional nuclear family?
The fourth question is the one that turns a list of policies into an argument, because it is the one every perspective answers differently.
Social policy and the family video
A short video covering policies including the One Child Policy, welfare benefits and child protection laws.
How social policy comes up in the AQA exam
Social policy appears on Paper 2 (7192/2), Topics in Sociology, in the families and households section. The specification requires you to understand the relationship of the family to the social structure and social change, with particular reference to the economy and to state policies.
It comes up in three formats.
As a 10-mark question with an item — “Applying material from Item X, analyse two ways in which social policies may have affected family life.” Remember that both points must come from the item. There are marks for analysis and application here.
As a 10-mark question without an item — “Outline and explain two ways in which government policies may have affected the position of women within the family.” No marks for evaluation on this type.
As a 20-mark essay, usually asking you to evaluate the view that social policies have benefited a particular group, or have supported or undermined the nuclear family.
Essay plan: ‘Evaluate the view that social policies have benefited women more than men’ (20 marks)
Introduction. Define social policy. Signpost that policies aimed at gender equality have improved women’s formal position substantially, but that provision around childbirth and care continues to assume women are the primary carers — so the picture is one of gains within an unchanged structure.
P1 — Policies that have clearly benefited women. The 1969 Divorce Act and 2022 no-fault divorce made leaving a marriage practical and less adversarial; women bring the majority of applications. The 1970 Equal Pay Act supported economic independence. The 2025 childcare expansion removes the main barrier to mothers’ full-time employment. Liberal Feminist reading: incremental reform works.
P2 — Policies that appear to help women but reinforce their role as carers. 39 weeks of paid maternity leave against two weeks of paternity leave. Shared Parental Leave that requires the mother to surrender her own entitlement, with predictably low take-up. Day-one paternity leave from 2026 that is unpaid unless the father has six months’ service. Radical Feminist reading: the dual burden survives the reform.
P3 — Policies that have harmed particular groups of women. The two-child limit, which fell hardest on lone mothers and larger families, in force 2017 to 2026. The benefit cap, still in place, which absorbs part of the gain from its abolition. Marxist Feminist reading: class determines which women benefit.
P4 — Donzelot’s alternative framing. Asking who benefits assumes policy is help. Donzelot argues that welfare provision is also surveillance, and that it falls most heavily on poor families — disproportionately lone mothers, who are subject to more professional scrutiny than any other family type. On this reading, more policy directed at women is not straightforwardly more benefit to women.
Conclusion. Take a position. The defensible one: policies have improved women’s formal and legal position markedly, but provision around childbirth and childcare still encodes the assumption that women are the primary carers, which limits how far formal equality translates into equality at home. The 2026 changes are a real improvement and they do not resolve that.
Families and Households Revision Bundle
If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my families and households revision notes bundle — which contains the following:
[IMAGE: Families and Households Revision Bundle cover — linked to the Sellfy product]
- 71 pages of revision notes covering perspectives on the family, changing patterns of marriage and divorce, family diversity, power and equality in relationships, childhood, social policy and the family, and demography
- 14 mind maps in PDF and PNG format, including a family policy timeline
- Families and households 10-mark practice questions, including three ‘outline and explain two things’ questions
- Nine essay plans and model answers
Signposting and Related Posts
This post has been written primarily for students studying the families and households topic, as part of the AQA’s A-Level Sociology course (specification 7192, Paper 2).
Before this topic students usually cover perspectives on the family, which gives you the theoretical positions this post applies to policy.
The New Right view of the family is the perspective most directly concerned with social policy, and worth reading alongside this one.
Feminist perspectives on the family sets out the liberal, radical and Marxist Feminist positions in more depth than the summary above.
You might also like this short video post on how social policies affect family life.
For everything else on this module, see my A-level sociology families and households page.
Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com
Sources
Office for National Statistics (17 April 2026) Families and Households in the UK: 2025
Office for National Statistics (December 2022) Civil Partnerships in England and Wales: 2021
HM Treasury (26 November 2025) Child Benefit and Guardian’s Allowance uprating for 2026-27, Hansard
Department for Work and Pensions Benefit and pension rates 2026 to 2027
Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Act 2026
House of Commons Library Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Bill
House of Commons Library Expanding government-funded childcare in England
House of Commons Library (May 2026) Which children are most likely to be in poverty in the UK?
Ministry of Justice (April 2022) ‘Blame game’ ends as no-fault divorce comes into force
Donzelot, J. (1977) The Policing of Families
Fletcher, R. (1966) The Family and Marriage in Britain
Murray, C. (1984) Losing Ground
thank you for writing this article it really helped my educational learning 🙂