The EU’s family research body, Family Platform (FP), has set out its research programme for next few years.

The agenda is set out under a range of headings; Family Policy, Care, Life Course and Transitions, Doing Family, Migration and Mobility, Inequalities and Insecurities, Media and New Information Technologies.

However, in spite of an FP report last year showing a steep rise in divorce in the EU over the past 40 years, and a marked fall off in the European marriage rate, no research will be done on the impact of family structure on child wellbeing.

Instead, one of the main priorities will be to examine how to provide care for an increasingly aging population.

The report says that care “was highlighted as the most important field for policy, particularly in the light of the societal trends towards demographic ageing, changed gender roles, and female labour force participation”.

It says that the aim of the agenda is to build “a research roadmap for the European Union for the years ahead”.

The report says: “The realisation of this research roadmap could help policy makers to meet future societal challenges and to improve the wellbeing of families.”

It says that the agenda will assist policy makers and researchers in the field of social and family policy.

However, the research will not be examining the impact of declining rates of marriage, and increasing level of divorce, on children or on European society.

This is despite a report published last year by the FP which shows that European divorce rates have been constantly on the rise since 1965. According to their figures, the divorce rate across the EU more than doubled from 0.8 (divorces per 1000 persons) in 1965 to 2.0 in 2005. The figures show that the rate levelled off at 2.0 divorces per 1000 people in 2003.

And while the EU-wide marriage rate was at 7.64 marriages per 1,000 people in 1965, it fell to as low as 4.87 in 2007. According to the researchers, the marriage rate only began to stabilise in the early 2000s.

The country showing the highest rate of divorce was Lithuania, with 3.1 divorces per thousand people, closely followed by Belgium, with 2.8 divorces per thousand, and Denmark and Latvia, which each had divorce rates of 2.7 divorces per thousand people.

Greece (with 1.2 divorces per thousand people in 2007), Italy (with 0.9 divorces per thousand people) and Ireland (with 0.8 divorces per thousand people in 2007) had the lowest rates of divorce.

In terms of the marriage rate, Ireland is ranked somewhere in the middle in European terms.

The study, using figures from 2008, showed that Ireland had a marriage rate of a little over five per thousand people. The highest marriage rate was in Cyprus, where figures showed that there were over 7.5 marriages per thousand people in 2007.

The study also noted a fall in European fertility, resulting from an increase in the age of women in giving birth.

The figures showed that increases had been most pronounced in Central European and Scandinavian countries (except Sweden), with increases of up to 5.1 years since the 1970s.

However, while the fertility rate in the EU overall is below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman of childbearing age, the study also showed that, in most European countries, most women want to have two or more children.

The study notes that “in a number of Scandinavian and Southern European countries, it even ranks between 2.5 and 3 children per woman”.

It says: “In most European countries, fertility intentions thus appear to clearly outnumber actually realised fertility figure…”.

The report also highlights the fact “countries with a high incidence of out?of?wedlock births, i.e. those where the relationship between marriage and childbirth has weakened most, are those countries with the highest fertility levels”.

It notes: “The postponement (or even foregoing) of marriage thus cannot be seen as a major driver of declining fertility in modern European societies. Indeed, it is the countries of Southern Europe, where the incidence of out?of?wedlock children is among the lowest in Europe, that simultaneously display the lowest level of fertility.”