ABSTRACT
The research project on which this book is based was funded by the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) and ran from January 2004 to December 2007 at a time of major shifts in the organisation of services for children and young people. Over the four years of the study we worked with practitioners such as educational psychologists, children and families workers, teachers, education welfare officers, health professionals, speech and language therapists and colleagues from the voluntary sector who were all learning to work together in ways they had not done before in order to support the social inclusion of children and young people. They were learning to do this work while relationships between their organisations reconfigured around them. They remained focused on what they saw as the needs of children and adjusted their practices. In many ways, their practices raced ahead of both local and national strategies as they worked creatively for children in shifting systems. LIW was set up to capture the learning that occurred in these developing practices and the conditions that made learning possible. Two years into the study a research team based in Northern Ireland received TLRP funding to extend the LIW work in a different context. The Northern Irish LIW study did not entirely replicate the main study, but was an important sounding board for the ideas developed in the English analyses. In this chapter we outline the development of UK policy on the prevention of social exclusion through inter-agency collaborations and introduce the LIW study.
