Policy & Practice

This book is an invaluable resource, employing a 'bottom-up' approach to learning. It presents vivid examples of social work practice with children and families and real life illustrations of the challenges facing practitioners. With analysis of each section, it provides essential guidance for students and sets standards for training and practice.

The principle of service user involvement in decisions that affect them directly is now generally supported, but many voluntary organisations remain under scrutiny because of slow implementation. This report explores the processes of change in eleven voluntary organisations to draw out lessons relevant to the wider sector.

From a campaigning concept in the 1970s, direct payments - the substitution of cash for services - have become a key part of UK government social care provision. This book charts the change, critically evaluating progress, take-up, inclusion and access to direct payments by different user groups.

This is a qualitative study that documents the daily lives of vulnerable lone mothers and their children in Denmark. Loss of rights, gender and ethnic inequality, and family violence all emerge as key themes with international implications. Policy and practice recommendations are made with wide-ranging applications for an international audience.

This review of research and development initiatives intended to help disabled people get (or stay in) work, takes views of disabled people as a yardstick by which to assess good practice. It pinpoints gaps in existing research, and highlights the varying requirements of disabled people, employers and service providers as users of research.

In the year 2000, the Human Rights Act 1998 came into force. This book reviews the implications of the Act for disabled people.

By examining policy, meanings of 'home' and potential barriers to housing options, this book provides a comprehensive overview and investigation of housing issues for disabled people from a social model perspective.

This book charts key British developments in child welfare, child poverty research and state support for children from 1800 to the present day. With direct quotations from key sources, it argues that even in the face of clear evidence of hardship the response of policy makers to child poverty has been ambivalent.

This book examines the relationship between health and domestic violence. In a qualitative study of the attitudes of health professionals and the women with whom they come into contact, it gives voice to a range of issues which urgently need to be addressed providing guidance for training and practice, as well as recommendations for policy makers.

This moving book about the lives of families in London's East End gives important new insights into neighbourhood relations (including race relations), through the eyes of the local community. Using an up-to-date account of life in East London, the authors illustrate how cities faced with neighbourhoods in decline are changing.

One of the key objectives of government neighbourhood policy is to encourage a sustainable mix of tenures and incomes. This report addresses questions of why integration has been so difficult to achieve in practice and draws conclusions for future policy.

FREE pdf version available online at www.jrf.org.uk

Challenging current thinking, this important book is the first to focus on the role of area-based initiatives to tackle the link between education, disadvantage and place. Aimed at all those actively seeking to tackle disadvantage, including policymakers, practitioners, academics and students.