ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s, the privatization and marketization of social work and social care services within England and the other parts of the United Kingdom have remained a prominent policy-related reform. Its impact has been profound upon social service and formal care delivery and organization, and it has also affected the changing associated role and identity of social workers (Clarke, 1996; Harris, 2003; Jones, 2015). The implications of this increasingly universal neoliberal policy mandate have included the further restricting of the “life chances” of many children and young people in care, a process which not uncommonly goes on to last throughout the life course. Moreover, it will be maintained that privatization often remains central to the commodification of childhood within care, and that marketization plays an important role in socially excluding children. Social workers in England and other parts of the United Kingdom are inevitably drawn into this dystopian political outcome.
