Policy Press

Textbooks

Education is at the heart of our mission to make a difference. Our goal is to support students’ learning with materials that foster understanding, confidence and skills.

Take a look at our textbooks below or browse by subject.

We have more resources, including free journal articles and Open Access titles, available on our student resources page.

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Showing 133-144 of 279 items.

Multi-Agency Working in Criminal Justice

Theory, Policy and Practice

Fully revised and expanded to encompass the most up-to-date theory, policy and practice, this comprehensive text considers the different aspects of multi-agency working within criminal justice, bringing together probation, policing, prison, social work, criminological and organizational studies perspectives.

Policy Press

Urban Informality

An Introduction

This book provides an introductory overview to the concept of ‘urban informality’, taking an international perspective across the global North and South. It explores theoretical understandings of the term, and looks at how it affects ways of living, such as land use, housing and basic services, working lives and political informality.

Bristol Uni Press

Rural Places and Planning

Stories from the Global Countryside

This book provides a compact analysis for students and early-career practitioners of the critical connections between place capitals and the broader practices of planning, seeded within rural communities. It introduces the breadth of the discipline, presenting examples of what planning means and what it can achieve in different rural places.

Policy Press

Understanding equal opportunities and diversity

The social differentiations and intersections of inequality

This book challenges the official discourse that shapes the debates on Equal Opportunities and Diversity (EO&D) at national, regional and European level and will be a key text for students and researchers of EO&D in many fields.

Policy Press

Modernising social work

Critical considerations

Edited by John Harris and Vicky White

New Labour's modernisation agenda has produced an avalanche of change that has posed formidable challenges for everyone involved in social work, whether as service users, practitioners or managers. "Modernising Social Work" provides a radical appraisal of the far-reaching changes in their theoretical, historical and policy contexts.

Policy Press

Ageing, health and care

The ageing of the population has enormous policy implications for health care. This important new textbook, written by a leader in the field, covers key questions such as the fitness of older people in the future, the widening inequalities in the health of older people and how health in old age reflects habits and behaviour in earlier life.

Policy Press

Understanding the policy process

Analysing welfare policy and practice

Using core concepts of policy analysis "Understanding the policy process" builds up a full explanation of social policy change that can be applied to any aspect of welfare policy, public and social policy. This second edition of the book updates the first edition for the post-Blair era with international case studies from numerous countries.

Policy Press

Rationing in health care

The theory and practice of priority setting

The challenges faced by those rationing scarce health care resources have intensified recently. In an accessible style, this book tackles this challenge by exploring the latest thinking and practice on priority setting methods.

Policy Press

Changing Children's Services

Working and Learning Together

Edited by Pam Foley and Andy Rixon

This book focuses on the drive towards increasingly integrated ways of working in children’s services across the UK. The new edition of this bestselling textbook critically examines the potential and reality of closer ‘working together’, asking whether such new ways of working will be able to respond more effectively to the needs of children.

Policy Press

Evidence Based Policing

An Introduction

Examining what makes something evidence-based and not merely evidence-informed, this book unifies the voices of police practitioners, academics, and pracademics. It provides real world examples of evidence-based police practices and how police research can be created and applied in the field.

Policy Press

Organisational Behaviour for Social Work

Using real social work case examples, Organisational behaviour for social work unites the well-established study of behaviour in organizations with the special, and sometimes unusual, organizational settings of social work practice.

Policy Press

What is professional social work?

What is Professional Social Work? is a now classic analysis of social work as a discourse between three aspects of practice: social order, therapeutic and transformational perspectives. It enables social workers to analyse and value the role of social work in present-day multiprofessional social care.

Policy Press