In the week that it emerged that there could be up to 700,000 young carers looking after their parents and close relatives, five of them met David Cameron to explain the difficulties they faced. Solutions were rather more elusive.
It probably didn't feel like the best of starts for the new children's commissioner for England, Maggie Atkinson.
I fear for the health of the policy gurus at Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice. Their seeming long hours and late nights dedicated to keeping us informed of the continuing tremors along the fault line of broken Britain appear to be inducing a form of amnesia.
British Red Cross marked World Aids Day 2009 by releasing the findings of a survey of young people's attitudes towards the virus - with some paradoxical results.
Courtesy of a huge effort from teenage girls, the UK has found itself top of the international league in one respect: drunkenness.
It is Broken Britain week at Conservative Party HQ, with shadow home secretary Chris Grayling attempting to remind us how bad things have become. And he mentioned political correctness only once.
Dammit. We mention the words Tory and epiphany in the same sentence and up pop former leader Iain Duncan Smith and shadow home secretary Chris Grayling to discredit the mega-brainpower of the Outside Left policy unit.
Fostering Fortnight has just ended but agencies fear that a carers crisis is looming.
Sir Alan Steer, the government's school behaviour tsar
(yes, there is one), is concerned about the influence on pupils of celebrity
culture - if indeed culture is the right word.
The knee has jerked. This time, after two boys aged 10
and 11 were charged with attempted murder in Doncaster, it is Chris Grayling's
knee.
| Outside Left questions the thinking behind today’s social policy, with a sometimes wry, occasionally cynical, always straight-talking look at the political elite that shapes it, written by sub editor, Mike McNabb. |
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