Policy & Practice

Leading researchers from across the globe look at the negative impact neoliberalism has had on children's services.

Over the last decade, the reformed youth justice system has seen increases in the numbers of children and young people in custody, a sharp rise in indeterminate sentences and the continuing deaths of young prisoners. This report brings together contributions from leading experts to critically examine current policy and practice.

What is it like to be a child growing up in Britain these days? Is it a happy or anxious time? What are the best and worst aspects of being a child today? This book draws on accounts of over two thousand children and five hundred adults, to examine the present day meaning of childhood and its implications for policy and practice.

A decade of sustained change in policy and funding has altered the landscape of children’s early intervention services and changed the role of charities in it. This study reviews the new interplay between public and third sector providers, considering future roles, opportunities and challenges for practitioners, policy makers and volunteers alike.

Chinese older people living in the UK suffer from a number of disadvantages compounded by exclusion from both their own community and the mainstream community. Through interviews with 100 Chinese older people, this unique report provides suggestions for good policy and practice for promoting Chinese older people's inclusion in both communities.

Can and should asset-based policies become a new pillar of the welfare state? Can they form the basis for a more egalitarian form of market economy? The citizen's stake throws open the debate by bringing together the ideas of leading thinkers in academia and policy to explore the future scope of asset-based policies in Britain.

Collaborative working explores the influence of agency through the role of individual actors in collaborative working processes, known as boundary spanners. 

Despite the increasing policy interest in work-life balance issues, relatively little research has been carried out into the links between self-employment and family life. This report considers, for the first time, the extent to which new family-friendly initiatives and legislation provide adequate support for self-employed parents.

This book provides a rigorous and challenging review of recent research in the realms of communication and cultural diversity. Focusing on health communication interventions concerning service users who may lack fluency in English, it shows that meeting the needs of all health service users depends on both structures and processes of communication.

This book re-assesses the benefits and failures of competition, how public and private prisons compare, the impact of competition on the public sector’s performance, and how well Government has managed this ‘quasi-market’.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. The book is a guide to how the measurement of violence can be best achieved. It shows how to make femicide, rape, domestic violence, and FGM visible in official statistics and offers practical guidance on definitions, indicators and coordination mechanisms.

This book challenges the traditional view that the consultants are brought in as experts and instead examines ways of using consultancy to empower staff, patients, service users and members of the public.