Education and Social Policy
Introduction Social policy, according to Jary & Jary is defined as "a field of study which entails the economic, political, socio-legal and sociological examination of the ways in which central and local governmental policies affect the lives of individuals and communities" They say further that the term is used in various ways by different authors but the prevailing social work view is that the term social policy is used to describe social administration when referring to the institutionalised services provided by the State particularly with regard to welfare. For example; health care, education, social security, personal social services, law and housing. This work will focus on one of Beveridges five giant evils - ignorance (Taylor Richardson et al) or education, not specifically on basic schooling, but including social education. Moreover, I hope to show that past as well as current social policy still has an impact on people who offend today, since it is, I believe, some of the omissions in the past which may be responsible for the predicaments my current supervisees find themselves in today. I have also researched and used material reflecting social policy in Newham particularly, since it is in the London Borough of Newham that I practice and therefore relevant to discussion of my own practice experience. Local authority welfare provisions make and deliver social policy in exactly the same way as Central Government but are best equipped to decide how they allocate their resources according to local need (Taylor, Richardson et al). In view of this, I refer in the main to policy with a small p, because the documents and materials I refer to are generally methods of delivering policy objectives but nevertheless are in themselves instruments of social policy.