Improving Inter-Professional Collaborations: Multi-agency Working for Children's Wellbeing

** Shortlisted for the NASEN Special Educational Needs Academic Book Award 2009 **
Inter-professional collaborations are invaluable relationships which can prevent the social exclusion of children and young people and are now a common feature of welfare policies worldwide.
Drawing on a four year study of the skills and understanding required of practitioners in order to establish the most effective interagency collaborations, this comprehensive text


Gives examples from practitioners developing inter-professional practices allow readers to reflect on their relevance for their own work


Emphasises what needs to be learnt for responsive inter-professional work and how that learning can be promoted


Examines how professional and organisational learning are intertwined


Suggests how organisations can provide conditions to support the enhanced forms of professional practices revealed in the study


Reveals the professional motives driving the practices as well as how they are founded and sustained

Full of ideas to help shape collaborative inter-professional practice this book shows that specialist expertise is distributed across local networks. The reader is encouraged to develop the capacity to recognise the expertise of others and to negotiate theor work with others.
This book is essential reading for practitioners in education and educational psychology or social work, and offers crucial insights for local strategists and those involved in professional development work.

The book also has a great deal to offer researchers working in the area of cultural historical activity theory (CHAT). The four year study was framed by CHAT and offers a well-worked example of how CHAT can be used to reveal sense-making in new practices and the organizational implications of enhanced professional decision-making.

As well as being important contributors to the developing CHAT field, the five authors have worked in the area of social exclusion and professional learning for several years and have brought inter-disciplinary strengths to this account of inter-professional work.

Anne Edwards is Professor of Educational Studies and Director of Research at Oxford University.
Harry Daniels is Professor of Education at the University of Bath.
Tony Gallagher is Professor of Education at Queen’s University, Belfast.
Jane Leadbetter and Paul Warmington are Senior Lecturers in the School of Education at the University of Birmingham.

Selected Contents: Introduction and Acknowledgements 1. Social inclusion and inter-professional collaboration 2. Professional learning for inter-professional collaboration 3. The Case Studies 4. What are practitioners learning while doing inter-professional work? 5. How and where are practitioners learning? 6. What have been the challenges? 7. Implications of the LIW study for the learning individual professionals 8. Implications for organizations involved in inter-professional collaborations 9. The implications of the learning in and for interagency working project for cultural historical activity theory Appendix A: Activity Theory in the Learning in and for Interagency Working (LIW) Project References