基本説明
Offers an original contribution to the understanding of care and work in children's services in Britain in the early 21st century.
Full Description
Coming to Care offers an original contribution to the understanding of care and care work in children's services in Britain in the early twenty first century. It provides fascinating insights into the factors that influence why people enter and leave care work, their motivations and the intersection of their work with their family lives.
Focusing on four diverse groups of workers - residential social workers, foster carers, family support workers and community childminders - who take on the care of vulnerable children and young people in the context of relatively low levels of qualifications, the book examines their life course as care workers. It explores: the range of factors that attract people into care work, including the biographical circumstances and the serendipitous factors that propel them into the work; their understandings of and commitment to the work; and how their identities as care workers are created and sustained.
The book is highly relevant to current policy debates about the development of children's services and reforming the childcare workforce and offers a range of practical recommendations. It should provide interesting reading to policy makers and service providers, as well as academics and students in the childcare and social care fields.
Contents
Setting the scene; The study; The origins of a care ethic in care workers' childhoods; Entering care work with vulnerable children; Care workers' careers and identities: change and continuity; What do vulnerable children need? Understandings of care; Experiences of care work; Leavers, movers and stayers; Managing care work and family life; Conclusions and policy implications.
