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Social care needs excellent leaders now more than ever. Effective leaders aim high, listen to what the service users want and need, inspire their staff and continually question what they are doing and why. This book draws together the latest research on fundamental leadership issues in social care, discussing collaborative leadership and the importance of place-based development, exploring the key disciplines of supervision, management and leadership and examining the purpose of a learning framework for social care. Comparative approaches are also provided by practitioners working outside of s

Adult social care in Britain has been at the centre of much media and public attention in recent years. Revelations of horrific abuse in learning disability settings, the collapse of major private care home providers, abject failures of inspection and regulation, and uncertainty over how long-term care of older people should be funded have all given rise to serious public concern. In this short form book, part of the Critical and Radical Debates in Social Work series, Iain Ferguson and Michael Lavalette give an historical overview of adult social care. The roots of the current crisis are located in the under-valuing of older people and adults with disabilities and in the marketisation of social care over the past two decades. The authors critically examine recent developments in social work with adults, including the personalisation agenda, and the prospects for adult social care and social work in a context of seemingly never-ending austerity

Julie Phillips argues that preparation is the most important element in running successful groups, and explores the issues that practitioners should address. She demonstrates how to prepare effectively, drawing on eight extended case studies with a variety of groups ranging from a positive parenting group to an anger management group.

205p. : ill. ; 23cm. ; In answer to popular demand from students and practitioners alike, Braye and Preston-Shoot have produced a guide to understanding the complex area of community care. What are the core components of the Government's community care policy? What do terms like partnership, anti-discriminatory and anti-oppressive practice mean? This book provides a simple exposition of the concepts and value-base underpinning community care policy and practice. Written in a jargon-free style, it goes beyond the how-to approach of much of the existing social care literature and examines the principles and values on which professionals involved in welfare provision base their work. It addresses issues of power and partnership in professional practice and identifies dilemmas arising from the relationship between Needs, Rights and Resources, between Autonomy, Paternalism and Empowerment. It tackles the choices and uncertainties faced by those making decisions about service provision, and offers survival strategies to professionals under stress.

The pandemic has required children's social care to embrace digital means to maintain vital support. Here, experts set out how this can be built on to improve how services meet children and families' needs

PurposeThere are often calls for more focus on outcomes in Children's Social Care yet there is little consensus on what these outcomes should be. Key challenges include who should decide what outcomes should be measured and the sheer range of issues that social workers deal with. The purpose of this paper is to provide a reflective account of approaches to measuring outcomes that the author has used in recent studies in order to illustrate the complexity involved in understanding what the purpose of Children's Social Care is and therefore how outcomes might be measured.Design/methodology/approachA review of and reflection on lessons from recent research studies carried out by the author and colleagues.FindingsThe results are used to illustrate and support an argument that Children's Social Care performs multiple functions and that this has implications for thinking about outcomes. Helping children and parents is one element of the work, but assessing risk across large numbers of referrals and identifying those that require involvement is equally important. Furthermore, the social work role requires complex considerations around liberty and the rights of parents and children. One consequence of this is that the quality of the service provided is important in its own right.Research limitations/implicationsIt is suggested that the evaluation of Children's Social Care involves four types of outcomes: measures of the quality of the service provided; assessment of whether the "right" families are being worked with; client-defined measures of change; and the development of appropriate standardised instruments. Examples of approaches in each area are discussed.Practical implicationsThe theoretical considerations suggest that we need to have a multi-dimensional approach to evaluating, inspecting and leading Children's Social Care services. In particular, the importance of the quality of delivery and appropriate targeting of the service are emphasised, as well as considering various approaches to measuring outcomes.Originality/valueThe paper proposes a combination of qualitative and quantitative measures of process, assessment and outcomes for evaluating outcomes in Children's Social Care.

England's largest authority outlines plans to transfer children's social care services to an independent trust