FOREWORD.

• Author: Rowe, Elizabeth

The 29th of October marked New Zealand's inaugural national Children's Day. In keeping with this event, the 15th issue of the Social Policy Journal has a strong focus on children's issues: four papers that range across the fields of health, education and strategic research planning. In addition, there are papers dealing with social indicators, immigrants, community intervention and the use of impact assessment in the process of policy development. All in all, this issue provides quite a broad sampling of policy concerns.

Rachel Smithies and Sue Bidrose draw on the discussions that took place at the "Seminar on Children's Policy", recently sponsored by the Ministry of Social Policy, to explore some of the areas of debate that have arisen in the early stages of developing a research strategy for children for the next five years. Their paper also provides a stocktake of current policy-oriented research on children in New Zealand and identifies the research gaps.

In very different ways, two of our contributions deal with young people and their education. Barbara Collins identifies the incongruities to be found between the laws dealing with the access of young people in New Zealand to sexual health education, abortion and contraception, and argues for the need for legislative change. Roy Nash uses data from the "Progress at School" project to analyse the relationship between educational aspirations and achievement, and then explores the very particular circumstances of Pacific students.

In a paper that follows on from their previous contribution to the Social Policy Journal, about the development of the Maori SIDS Prevention Programme, David Tipene-Leach, Sally Abel, Carole Everard and Riripeti Haretuku shift their focus to the wider scope of families' socio-economic environment, and interagency interaction and impact. They identify the key problems that they have found in the dealings of multiple agencies with vulnerable families, and discuss the strategies they have developed to deal with them.

Also concerned with health issues, although oriented towards the entire policy arena, Louise Signal and Gillian Durham present an argument for the incorporation of formal health impact assessment tools across the board in the policy-making process.

Two papers focus on the use of social indicators, one at the macro-level and...