Press releases

This year’s British Social Attitudes Survey finds a nation displaying multiple and sometimes rapidly changing identities, with Brexit continuing to divide.

The number of people who don’t believe in God has more than doubled in the past two decades, according to the most recent British Social Attitudes Survey, Britain’s longest running survey of public opinion.

Against a suite of government policies designed to enable parents to share childcare responsibilities more equally such as Shared Parental Leave, the British Social Attitudes Survey finds that 51% of people think the best option for a family with a pre-schooler is for the mother to do most of the childcare, despite 34% saying that parental leave should be evenly split between parentsi. In 2012, just 22% favoured the fifty-fifty split option.

The majority of childcare providers in England are offering 30 hours of free childcare, but there are clear differences in offering and delivery of the hours by provider type and by region. The first nationally representative study of early years and childcare providers, following the national rollout of the government policy in September 2017, reveals differences in how providers in different regions engage with the policy. It also finds that a third of school nurseries and just under a quarter of childminders are not offering 30 hours.

New data from the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) reveals significant shifts in attitudes to the government’s handling of the Brexit negotiation process. Only 7% of Brits think that the UK government has been handling the negotiations well. 80% of Leave voters and 85% of Remain voters believe the government is handling Britain’s exit badly.