Coming to Care : The Work and Family Lives of Workers Caring for Vulnerable Children

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.

Julia Brannen is Professor of the sociology of the family at UCL Institute of Education and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. With an international reputation for research on the lives of parents, children and young people in families, including work-family life, relations between the generations and food in families, she is well known for her methodological expertise, in particular for advancing mixed methods approaches.