As in previous years, this volume of Social Policy Review is organised into three sections. Part One reviews developments in key areas of social policy during 2006: education, health, housing, adult social care, children's services and social security. The introduction of a chapter on children's services for the first time this year reflects the substantial transformation that has taken place in recent years in the organisation of social services. The emphasis on partnership working has resulted in the reappearance of services organised around the characteristics of particular client groups, replacing the Seebohm vision in which local authority social services departments were responsible for providing a service that offered support to all vulnerable groups.

The chapters in Part Two are by authors who presented papers at the annual international conference of the Social Policy Association held at Birmingham University in July 2006. Because the conference produced a large number of papers on a wide range of topics, the selection criteria for the chapters in Part Two were not simply to fit them to some synthetically derived theme, but reflect an attempt to represent this breadth. The selection has been made primarily on the basis of the interest and topicality of the material presented, while equally demonstrating the vitality of the discipline of social policy. The chapters have in common a focus on the less often discussed and ‘difficult to research’ challenges encountered within empirical research.

The theme for the chapters in Part Three is migration and social policy. This is an issue that has provoked substantial debate and is high on the political agenda both nationally and internationally. The chapters in this section connect with, and expand on, key contemporary policy debates in the field of migration – recent enlargement of the European Union and the scale and impact of migration from new member states, in particular Eastern Europe; the challenges brought about by the migration of older people not only in terms of their ability to access adequate and appropriate welfare services, but also to the existing systems of welfare provision and the principles on which they were built; and finally migration processes as the management of complex and multiple life courses with a particular focus on children.

Part One: Current services

A number of common themes emerge from these reviews of developments in key social policy areas in 2006.