Description: Services for families and children are rightfully the focus of intense scrutiny and debate, and there is a clear need to establish a knowledge of which services work well. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of research evidence from the UK and USA on the effectiveness of selected child welfare interventions.
Brief description: Wendy Rose is Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Health and Social Care at the Open University, UK, and works on national and international child welfare research and development projects. She was previously a senior civil servant advising the government on children's policy.
Review Quotes:
If you are interested in learning what is known and particularly, what is still unknown about a comprehensive range of interventions to improve the lives of children in all sorts of difficulties, this is the book for you...There are consequently important lessons for both policy-makers and service providers in this book. Once again, the interventions that seem to be most effective work with children, young people, and parents. They have clear goals, are appropriately targeted and they are delivered by a well-trained and well-supported staff. There is much valuable discussion on the complexity of the problems that children and families face.
Workforce investment seems to be the route to making sure that those interventions that we know form this book and others do work, are used routinely, appropriately and with skill. We have a very large and diverse workforce in children's social care. This book illustrates both the need to learn more about what works, with whom and u under what circumstances, but it also illustrates the need to improve the frontline delivery of services now, with the best use of the knowledge we already have. This will only be achieved by skilled and confident practitioners who can learn from this book.--Children & Society