Policy and practice

Bringing together a range of perspectives from practice, lived experience and academia, this is an accessible and timely guide to children’s services reform. Critically considering the impact of the MacAlister Review, the book highlights both the positive and negative aspects of reform, before setting out alternative policy and practice directions.

This book sets out practical and theoretically robust approaches for understanding and tracking change that any organisation can use to evaluate their contribution to social change and become more efficient and effective.

EPDF and EPUB are available open access under CC BY NC ND licence. This publication was supported by University of Essex's open access fund.

Peter Appleton builds on research interviews with care-experienced young adults, and on cross-disciplinary theories of planning and of emotions, to develop a model of planning for young people leaving care.

Avoiding both over-simplification and jargon-riddled complexity, this book is an invaluable, straightforward guide to participatory research for you and your fellow practitioners working with community groups and organisations.

Situating the cases of England and Australia within broader global policy trends, this book critically analyses what has gone wrong with education policy. Drawing on wide-ranging research, the authors issue a fundamental challenge to current policy orthodoxies, and identify policy alternatives to make education both better and fairer.

Drawing on the history of social care, international comparisons and lived experience, this vital book outlines a different vision of social care as an essential part of England’s economic and social infrastructure that enables people to live good lives.

Telling the stories of low-income families, this book exposes the ways that pre-existing inequalities, insecurities and hardships were amplified during the pandemic in the UK and offers key policy recommendations for change.

Organised by the Society of Labour Lawyers, the Labour Party’s legal think tank, this book is a manifesto for change that showcases new policy ideas for the next government. It is a must-have collection of new insights into how a Labour government can renew Britain.

An examination of the consequences of poverty and inequality and the challenge they pose to the engaged social work academic and practitioner.

An historical overview of adult social care that locates the roots of the current crisis in the under-valuing of older people and adults with disabilities and in the marketisation of social care over the past two decades.

One of Britain's foremost social work academics, Peter Beresford, challenges the personalisation agenda and its consequences on service users.

Jeremy Weinstein draws on case studies and his own experience to develop a new model of practice in mental health social work.