Abstract

Improving the well-being of children is more effective when social care professionals work with the children's parents, families and communities. This collection brings together innovative interventions designed to nurture children's health and welfare, and analyses which types of programmes are most effective and why.

The contributors explore the impact of poverty on children's development and assess national initiatives set up to assess and reduce need. They present examples from the UK, US, Canada and Australia of specific interventions to counter or prevent difficulties in the domains of child development, parenting capacity and wider environmental factors. Many contributions demonstrate the importance of engaging with service users and helping communities to shape and direct their own programmes for change. The final section of the book presents useful approaches to assessing and evaluating services.

Demonstrating the need for close inter-agency collaboration and `joined up' services, this book is essential reading for policy makers, managers and practitioners in child welfare agencies, and social work academics and students.

The book presents a (deservedly) mixed picture of the current developments in children's services in the UK. I would recommend it to those who need a general overview of recent developments in child well-being and children's services, including social work students, researchers and practitioners and managers in the field.
Adoption and Fostering
Chapters on UK projects would prove of interest to managers and practitioners. The chapters on measuring outcomes and a description of government guidance were particularly helpful.
Community Care
This book successfully achieves its aim to exploring the current evidence of need, and the effectiveness of particular interventions to improve outcomes for children and families. I found it to be ambitious, timely and stimulating... There is something for everyone involved in family support. In children's services, where we need all the help we can get to understand one another's perspectives and practices, this book is very welcome… I will certainly be going back to this book again to follow up the research identified within it and I will be recommending it to colleagues.
Children Now
The first three chapters provide excellent overviews and summaries of the evidence of need, the impact of poverty and social exclusion on children themselves, on families and communities and the range of policies and the impact of these on children's well-being in the UK and the US. Other chapters throughout the book provide accounts of particular initiatives being undertaken in the different countries.
Cambridge University Press Journal
This book shows where we have come from and how much further we need to travel on the road to a research-based, outcome-focused children's services system capable of additionally enhancing children's well-being, It deserves to be widely read by everyone involved in making children's services'.
British Journal of Social Work