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.

The American architectural firm of Sparano + Mooney in Salt Lake City, Utah and Los Angeles, CA, stands for sustainable and innovative buildings that are harmoniously embedded in spectacular mountain landscapes. In this volume, architectural critic Michael Webb presents ten projects with the aid of photographs, drawings, sketches and texts, visualizing the process by which architectural ideas are conceived and realized. The architects respond in their plans to the overwhelming natural surroundings with restrained forms and the innovative detailing of materials. The firm's models, sketches, conceptual drafts and fully executed buildings offer thoughtful perspective on developing architecture that thrives on the relationship between concept and place. Accompanying essays relate the buildings to their regional contexts and also highlight analogies to Land Art.

In this volume international contributors examine the policy and organization of day care, showing how childminding networks have developed in differing economic and social climates. There are discussions on: levels of government intervention; setting quality standards; training and support for child-care providers; creating partnership between parents and carers; how economic changes can affect child care provision; and conflicts between caregivers' and families' values.