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Kerris Cooper

Kerris Cooper

CASE Visiting Senior Fellow

Expertise: poverty and disadvantage, food insecurity in early childhood, income and child development, economic hardship and parenting, parenting policy and welfare reform

Email:
kerris.cooper@epi.org.uk
Links:
Education Policy Institute

Biography

Kerris is experienced in both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Her research has focused on poverty and inequality in the UK, including the relationship between poverty and child and adult outcomes. Her thesis explored the relationship between poverty, maternal mental health and parenting. Kerris has been part of CASE both as a researcher and a PhD student. As Senior Visiting Fellow she continues to research disadvantage, more recently focused on food insecurity and inequalities in the early years as well as free school meals policy. Kerris is based at the Education Policy Institute as Senior Researcher in Early Years and Inequalities.

Kerris Cooper's current research interests are:

  • Child poverty
  • Early years inequalities
  • Food insecurity
  • Social security policies and welfare reform
  • Poverty and parenting
  • Poverty and the home learning environment

Kerris's latest projects include:

Latest

Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes Research Notes
Who is at risk of experiencing violence and has it changed overtime?

15 September 2022

Kerris Cooper and Polina Obolenskaya

Published crime statistics show that following a long-term decline in violent crime there has been a flattening out in recent years and certain types of violent crime have increased. This research note examines who is mo... Read more...
Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes Knowledge Exchange Briefs
Layers of engagement: learning from the Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes research programme public engagement exercise

24 August 2022

Tania Burchardt, Bert Provan and Kerris Cooper

The purpose of this note is to share with the research community the lessons we feel we have learned from a public engagement exercise that we undertook, in collaboration with Sense about Science, as part of the Social P... Read more...
Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes Research Papers
The Conservative Governments’ Record on Employment: Policies, Spending and Outcomes, May 2015 to pre-COVID 2020

27 July 2022

Abigail McKnight and Kerris Cooper

In this paper we evaluate the distributional impact of employment policy in the period since the Conservative Government took office in 2015 up until the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. We do this by followin... Read more...
CASEbriefs
Poverty and parenting in the UK: Patterns and pathways between economic hardship and mothers' parenting practices

11 January 2022

Kerris Cooper

This research examines to what extent there are differences in parenting across income groups, and whether these differences are unique to low-income parents. When comparisons are made across all income groups, rather th... Read more...
Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes Knowledge Exchange Briefs
Ethnic inequalities on the eve of the pandemic

20 July 2021

Kerris Cooper

This research, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, evaluated the impact of changes in social policies on inequalities since 2015 up until the eve of the pandemic. This briefing focuses on the findings that relate to ethni... Read more...
Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes Research Papers
The Conservative Governments’ Record on Social Security: Policies, Spending and Outcomes, May 2015 to pre-COVID 2020

23 February 2021

Kerris Cooper and John Hills

This paper uses the Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes framework to evaluate how social security policies evolved, how public spending changed, the effects of these on the generosity of the system, and evidence ... Read more...
CASEbriefs
The National Living Wage and falling earnings inequality

06 March 2020

Abigail McKnight and Kerris Cooper

The more generous National Living Wage replaced the National Minimum Wage for employees aged 25 and over in April 2016. In April 2020 it is due to increase to 60% of the average wage. In this policy brief we assess the ... Read more...
Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes Research Papers
Physical safety and Security: Policies, spending and outcomes 2015-2020

13 August 2019

Kerris Cooper and Nicola Lacey

This paper sets out to evaluate the development of policy in relation to physical safety and security in the period since the Conservative Government took office in 2015. Whilst people’s physical safety and security depe... Read more...

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