ABSTRACT
Tackling social exclusion requires holistic, joined up approaches which means bringing the main public services together through partnerships to focus on key forces of exclusion: low income, health inequalities, low educational attainment, constricted opportunities for women and race discrimination. This presents you with a number of challenges as a social worker because recent trends such as care management, with its focus on financial assessment and narrow interpretation of needs, and the heavy emphasis on child protection have only reinforced social work’s reliance on specialisms and crisis-oriented work (Audit Commission 2000; Barr et al. 2001).
