Service Integration in Schools: Research and Policy Discourses, Practices and Future Prospects

This is an important and timely collection in which recent research and interpretations are reported and debated. The papers provide a scholarly analysis of a range of significant issues, complexities and recurring themes. They provide theoretical, empirical and practical perspectives on what is involved in co-working and explore the ambiguities, contradictions and fragmentations in a new policy area that cuts across the remits previously held by a number of government departments. Overall, the papers provide a considered and wide-ranging critique of the key research and policy discourses that seek to influence the reformation of services and to remodel interprofessional and interagency working practices. In particular, the collection examines the ways in which the integration of services is operating in practice in the discrete policy contexts of the UK countries; the leadership and management of collaborative working and workforce remodelling; and whether, in addressing the hard questions of the form/s that future school services should take, there are any ‘global solutions’ from new research or from other places that might fruitfully be applied. In addressing these policy developments the collection has multiple readerships in mind and seeks to be both academic and policy relevant.