British Isles

This book explores the recent experiences of diverse paid care workers in four very different national contexts – Finland, Canada, South Africa and England – to learn from their experiences during COVID-19 and its aftermath.

Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. The gender pay gap is economically irrational and yet stubbornly persistent. Focusing on the finance industry which is known for its gender pay disparity, this book explores the efforts being made to fix gendered inequities in the workplace and the factors stalling progress for the future.

‘Desistance’ - understanding how people move away from offending – has become a significant policy focus in recent years, with desistance thinking transplanted from the adult to the youth justice system in England and Wales. This book is the first to critique this approach to justice-involved children.

Drawing on student experiences and the perspectives of senior leaders, this book challenges orthodox thinking about school exclusion and advocates for a fairer education system for disadvantaged students.

Despite the high aspirations of young people from disadvantaged communities, they face barriers that are frustrating the realisation of their educational ambitions. This book analyses the ‘left-behind’ phenomenon and explains how denied educational equality undermines social cohesion and what we can do about it.

Based on the findings of the Innovate Project, this book asks how services can be re-envisioned and transformed through innovation. The authors offer insights into the core conditions necessary for socially just and practice-congruent social care innovation that responds to the distinctive, contemporary safeguarding concerns facing young people.

Published in collaboration with BUIRA, this book critically reviews the future of Industrial Relations (IR)in a changing work landscape and traces its historical evolution. Essential for academics, students and trade unions, it explores IR's significant changes over the past decade and its ongoing influence on our lives.

With a public health crisis gripping the UK, this book examines the organisational and political barriers to an effective public health system and determines that a new social contract is needed, in which health policy is truly public.

This book offers Ireland’s introduction of a welfare-to-work market as a case study that speaks to wider international debates in social and public policy about the role of market governance in intensifying the turn towards more regulatory and conditional welfare models on the ground.

A fascinating interpretation of the evolution of social policy in modern Ireland, as the product of a triangulated relationship between church, state and capital.

This second edition of a highly successful textbook offers a comprehensive introduction to social policy in Ireland addressing a range of social policy topics of growing importance in contemporary Irish society including issues related to children, service users and groups, migration, ethnicity, sexuality and climate change.