Social Work - Policy and Practice

This report investigates the circumstances, needs, views and life experiences of black young people with caring responsibilities. It highlights significant gaps in service provision, which result in young people undertaking caring responsibilities, and makes recommendations to improve services.

Alongside the current media preoccupation with high risk offenders, there has been a shift towards a greater focus on risk and public protection in UK criminal justice policy. This report draws together a distinguished panel to consider both the theory and application of the risk concept in work with young people and young adults that offend.

The government's NHS Plan emphasises the importance of services users' views. This report provides practical guidance on how to ensure that older people's views are heard, acted on, and monitored, in relation to service quality. It makes recommendations for ensuring that older people's views become an integral part of home care service provision.

'Regeneration', 'mainstreaming', 'community involvement', 'evidence-based policy', 'public service reform' - terms central to the government's policy programme for tackling social deprivation. This report describes how an East London community organisation has worked to give these terms practical meaning through its Social Enterprise Zone project.

This book looks at how community capacity building is delivered within neighbourhood regeneration programmes, focusing on the key issue of resourcing. This review is framed within the context of the government's emerging national strategy for neighbourhood renewal, and the New Commitment to Regeneration initiative.

Reflecting realities explores participants' perspectives on participation structures; capacity building and the technical and professional support available; and systems for monitoring and evaluating regeneration programmes. The report includes recommendations for national and regional government, local authorities and community organisations.

A document of the results of road-testing two frameworks for assessing community participation: Active partners: Benchmarking community involvement in regeneration (Yorkshire Forward, 2000) and Auditing community participation: An assessment handbook (The Policy Press, 2000).

Local urban high streets have the potential to meet policy aspirations with regard to sustainability and social inclusion, yet they have frequently been neglected. Drawing on case-studies in three different locations, this report provides a wealth of findings produced from a variety of sources.

A free pdf is available at www.jrf.org.uk

Drawing on experiences from nine UK cities, Developing people - Regenerating place analyses the views of a range of practitioners on how to achieve more effective joint working across area regeneration and social inclusion initiatives.

Drawing on interviews with older people, local authority care managers and direct payments support service workers, this topical report looks at how older people use direct payments and how they make them work.

This report presents the findings from the first national, representative survey of public attitudes to youth crime and youth justice in England and Wales. It carries clear policy implications in relation to both public education and reform of the youth justice system.

Learning from professional errors in social work is vital for successful reflective practice. With plenty of practice examples and questions for reflection, this is essential reading for social work students, practitioners and managers.