Catholics are urged to show a ‘preferential option for the poor’. For the most part debate about the exercise of such an option is primarily in terms of a justice model—righting the twin wrongs of the ‘exploitation’ and ‘oppression’ of the poor. But there is another, largely untheorised approach to helping strangers in need—Samaritanism. This paper provides an exposition of Samaritanism and a defence of its role in the modern Welfare State. In doing so it seeks to challenge non-Christians to put their rationale for helping the needy on an equally secure footing as that provided by Christianity.

This paper is concerned with the work of child care and with the division of work between mothers and others. Drawing on research data, it explores the idea that this work takes place in a domain located between the public and the private. The perspectives of mothers and health visitors on child care and health care are considered, with particular reference to their perspectives on their own and others' knowledge and responsibility.

In the United Kingdom a range of services for elderly people in the community has developed that is delivered by a variety of professionals and administered within different organisations. This has resulted in a problem of co-ordinating services to meet the individual needs of the most frail elderly people. In the United States ‘case management’ has been introduced as a way of improving the co-ordination of care. Despite structural differences in the provision of health and social services between the United States and the United Kingdom, the concept of case management has influenced the design of a number of innovatory schemes in the United Kingdom, including the Gloucester Care for Elderly People at Home project (CEPH). These innovatory schemes have demonstrated the need for a ‘keyworker’ and clarified the tasks that are involved in taking responsibility for co-ordinating services to meet the needs of elderly people at risk of failing to cope at home. There is, however, a danger of proliferating the complexity of service provision by creating a new breed of professional; an alternative might be to alter the responsibilities, attitudes and team orientation of existing professional workers so as to include taking on the key worker role for some of their clients.

Community schemes play an important part in a community approach to social work. This paper investigates the extent to which social workers' involvement in such schemes is influenced by personal preference or by their work setting. Data from questionnaires completed by 394 social workers/social work assistants show that the likelihood of a worker's involvement with a scheme varies with the organisation and procedures of the area office, the perceived attitudes of team leaders and the title of the worker's job. Workers' personal attitudes were related to involvement in schemes only in area offices organised on a geographical basis. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for the development of a community approach to social work and for the degree to which social workers can expect to control their work as autonomous professionals.

The determinants of the number of children in local authority care in England are examined using methods that distinguish the implications of current flows into and out of care from the continuing impact of past decisions. In the long term, the decline in the admission rate and the time that children can expect to spend in care between 1977 and 1986 would produce a 39 per cent fall in the number of children in care from that implied by flows into and out of care in 1977–8. These changes have been compounded by an 11 per cent decline in the size of the child population. In fact, though, the higher level of admissions in the past means that the number in care fell by only 29 per cent during this period. If admissions and rates of leaving care have remained at their 1985–6 levels since then, the number of children in care will drop by around 8,300 to under 59,000 in 1991.