This fully-updated, accessible textbook considers the theory and practice of critical social work in addressing inequality and social injustice. It is essential reading for students, educators and practitioners of child and family social work.

A deep exploration on how questions of time and its organisation affect planning practice, this book questions ‘project speed’: where time to think, deliberate and plan has been squeezed. The authors demonstrate the many benefits of slow planning for the key participants, multiple interests and planning system overall.

Drawing on unique new research gathered from three contrasting secondary schools in England, this book explores the aspirations, opportunities and experiences of young people from different social-class backgrounds against a backdrop of continuing inequalities in education.

This book powerfully sets out the case for Transitional Safeguarding, a new approach to protection and safeguarding designed to address the needs and behaviours of young people aged 15-24 who are falling between gaps in current systems, with often devastating results.

This bold new book offers an exhaustive diagnosis of global capitalism. Proposing a novel system of economic and political coordination based on a combination of market socialism and state planning, it offers crucial insights for thinking about alternatives to capitalism.

The devolution of social care policy has led to key differences emerging between the UK’s four care systems. This book presents research on the perspectives of social care policy makers within the UK’s four care systems, concluding that when given equal capacity to reform, the systems in each nation may take radically different shapes.

This book examines law’s troubled relationship with racial justice. Both a lawyer’s guide to anti-racism and an anti-racist’s guide to legal action, it unites these perspectives to help both groups understand how to use the law to tackle racial injustices.

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.

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.

Hindpal Singh Bhui argues that we need to look at who is sent to prison and why to disentangle reality from ideology and myth. Including the voices of prisoners, prison staff and victims, he asks whether prison is an institution for managing marginalized people, or if there is a better way to achieve the socially useful goals of prisons.

Gildea suggests that the more people who really understand what good history entails, the more likely history is to triumph over myth. He sees positive signs in public history, citizen historians and community projects, debunking claims that ‘you cannot rewrite history’, arguing that good history that’s attuned to its times must be rewritten.