Textbooks
Policy Press publishes a range of textbooks and other learning resources across the social sciences to suit a variety of course and learning needs. These are designed with students in mind and include many accessible features – from case studies and chapter summaries, to revision questions and illustrative boxes and diagrams.
The majority of our textbooks are available as consumer eBooks as well as in print and we are happy to discuss bespoke options such as print and digital packages or creating unique collections to suit your course needs. Our content is available through the key institutional content providers VitalSource and Kortext in early 2015, allowing seamless integration with VLE platforms. If you would like to discuss how we could help with your course resources, please contact pp-sales@bristol.ac.uk.
For more information about our textbooks, please see Information for Lecturers.
Making sense of Every Child Matters
Multi-professional practice guidance
This book considers the implications for practice of the 'Every Child Matters' (ECM) agenda for working with children, analysing the key issues from the perspective of the different professions that make up the 'new children's workforce'.
Youth justice in practice
Making a difference
This book examines youth justice in a UK and international context, highlighting the challenge facing all jurisdictions in balancing welfare and justice. It explores the impact of political ideas and influences on the structural and practical challenges of delivering youth justice.
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.
Modernising social work
Critical considerations
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.
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.
Social work in end-of-life and palliative care
Social work should help to strengthen individuals to achieve a respectful death and families to move forward in their lives. This valuable book focuses on practice interventions, advocating open communication and skilled interpersonal practice to help dying and bereaved people, their families and carers.
Radical social work in practice
Making a difference
This much-needed textbook provides a fresh understanding of the radical tradition and shows how it can be developed in contemporary social work.
The global social policy reader
This reader collects together for the first time a comprehensive range of key papers by leaders in the field from a wide range of sources that explain the concepts, actors and processes that constitute global social policy. The Reader will have broad appeal among undergraduate and postgraduate students in a range of social science subjects.
Understanding social welfare movements
"Understanding social welfare movements" is the first text to bring together social policy and social movement studies. The book provides a timely and much needed overview of the changing nature of social welfare as it has been shaped by the demands of social movements.
Religion, belief and social work
Making a difference
This book examines how religion and related beliefs have varied impacts on the needs and perceptions of practitioners, service users, and the support networks available to them.
The Peter Townsend reader
This reader brings together for the first time a collection of Peter Townsend's most distinctive work, allowing readers to review the changes that have taken place over the past six decades, and reflect on issues that have returned to the fore today.
Embodying identities
Culture, differences and social theory
This book shapes a new language of social theory that allows people to embody their differences with a sense of dignity and self-worth, enabling them to come to terms with the complexities of their lived identities in a post-modern globalised world.