Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.In the latest volume of the long-established Social Policy Review series, leading experts critically assess key developments and debates in social and public policy over the past year.Offering a wide-ranging exploration of contemporary issues – including labour market transitions, migrant experiences, welfare governance and inequalities in care – this book brings together research that reflects the diversity and dyna...

In At Risk, Karen J. Swift and Marilyn Callahan examine risk and risk assessment in the context of professional practice in child protection, social work, and other human services. They argue that the tools, technologies, and practices used to measure risk to the individual have gone unquestioned and unstudied and that current methods of risk assessment may be distorting the principles of social justice.Central to this study is an examination of the everyday experiences of...

This is an open access book.This book offers the first overview of the ‘wicked problems’ literature, often seen as complex, open-ended, and intractable, with both the nature of the ‘problem’ and the preferred ‘solution’ being strongly contested. It contextualises the debate using a wide range of relevant policy examples, explaining why these issues attract so much attention.There is an increasing interest in the conceptual and practical aspects of how ‘wicked problems’ are ...

Co-production and co-creation occur when citizens participate actively in delivering and designing the services they receive. It has come increasingly onto the agenda of policymakers, as interest in citizen participation has more generally soared. Expectations are high and it is regarded as a possible solution to the public sector’s decreased legitimacy and dwindling resources, by accessing more of society’s capacities. In addition, it is seen as part of a more general drive to reinvigorat...

Making policy is what governments do, but there are some fascinating and hotly debated issues associated with how government decisions get made in the interests of the people. The concept and practice of evidence-based policy-making insists that properly developed public policy draws on the best available evidence. This book considers how governments in Canada have historically interacted with research and what directions these interactions may take in the future. The goal of government maki...

Australian education policy for the past 40 years has been heading in the wrong direction and is entirely unsuitable for preparing young people for the 21st century. Exaggeration? Sadly not.For a teacher, there is nothing more exhilarating than encouraging young people to realise the power of learning. But in our schools today, teachers spend so much time preparing their students for high-stakes tests, gathering data and filling in forms, that many of them feel like the life has be...

Behavioural sciences help refine our understanding of human decision-making. Their insights are immensely relevant for policy-making since public intervention works much better when it targets real people rather than imaginary beings assumed to be perfectly rational. Increasingly, governments around the world are keen to rely on those insights for reshaping public interventions in a wide range of policy areas such as energy, health, financial services and data protection. When policy-makin...

Contemporary social work cannot be understood without an appreciation of the broader context of social policy in which it takes place. Such an understanding is increasingly important as social workers are expected to work across institutional, professional and even national boundaries in new ways profoundly affected by the changing global context.This insightful book examines how shifts in the dominant political ideology have affected the nature of welfare provision, the kinds of s...

This timely book provides a systematic overview and critique of contemporary approaches to educational change from some of the best-known writers and scholars in the field, including Andy Hargreaves, Larry Cuban, Ivor Goodson, Jeannie Oakes, Milbrey McLaughlin, Judyth Sachs and Ann Liebermann.Divided into four sections, the book addresses the key themes:What has been the impact of educational change?How has the impact differed in differen...

Does flexible working really provide a better work-life balance?Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, flexible working has become the norm for many workers. This volume offers an original examination of flexible working using data from 30 European countries and drawing on studies conducted in Australia, the US and India. Rather than providing a better work-life balance, the book reveals how flexible working can lead to exploitation, which manifests differently for women and men, such a...

This handbook provides a unique, systematic and comprehensive overview from leading experts in the field of the policy-making tools deployed at all the phases of the policy process. It covers the fundamentals of both new and established policy tools – from regulation and public enterprises to subsidies and information campaigns, as well as new tools, such as social impact investing, nudges, crowdsourcing, co-production and new digital governance and data analysis techniques.The boo...

In recent decades, the Canadian post-secondary education system has evolved to become more inclusive, now welcoming groups historically excluded from its many opportunities. Inviting the reader to explore the consequences of a rapidly changing student population, Serving Diverse Students in Canadian Higher Education presents new thinking about how education in general, and student services in particular, should be designed and delivered.A follow-up to Donna Hardy Cox and C...