Adoption and fostering are about providing children with families. National policies will obviously influence what actually happens, but in recent years the way policies are made and implemented has become as significant as the policies themselves. This is confirmed by two books describing the fashioning and implementation of two major child welfare initiatives in the UK — Providing a Sure Start (Eisenstadt, 2011) and Instruction to Deliver (Barber, 2008). Reviewing them together, Michael Little discusses how the process of developing social policy changed under New Labour and argues that this new situation is likely to endure.
