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Children's services agencies in England are increasingly expected to work together to plan needsled interventions in their locality. Such planning requires good information on local need and service take‐up, yet this is often lacking. Connecting data from single agency, multi‐agency and community studies in one district shows how the severity of need overlaps with different service and administrative categories. The findings point to the value of such mapping exercises, while the pattern that emerges highlights the importance of planning provision for all children and of linking intervention to thresholds of severity of need. The approach will have relevance to other care groups.

A method of fashioning needs‐led and evidence‐based services on a multi‐agency basis is described. The approach is based on research but is designed for application by professionals and users in agency settings. Its strengths and weaknesses and application on an international scale are discussed, using examples from provision for vulnerable children and families.

The purpose of this paper is to set out three dilemmas that challenge historians of education who write for both professional and academic audiences. It focuses on the example of using fiction as a source for understanding the informal education of girls in the twentieth century. It contributes to the debate over the purpose of history of education and the possibilities that intersecting and contested analytical frameworks might contribute to the development of the discipline.

The paper discusses the rules of engagement and the duties of a historian of education. It reforms current concerns into three dilemmas: audience, method and writing. It gives examples drawn from research into girls’ school stories between 1910 and 1960. It highlights three authors and stories set in Australia, England and an international school in order to explore what fiction offers in getting “inside” the classroom.

Developed from a conference keynote that explored intersecting and contested histories of education, the paper sets up as many questions as it provides answers but re-frames them to include the use of a genre that has been explored by historians of childhood and literature but less so by historians of education.

The vast quantity of stories set in girls’ schools between 1910 and 1960 necessarily demands a selective reading. Authors may specialise in the genre or be general young people’s fiction authors. Reading such stories must necessarily be set against changing social, cultural and political contexts. This paper uses examples from the genre in order to explore ways forward but cannot include an exhaustive methodology for reasons of space.

This paper suggests fiction as a way of broadening the remit of history of education and acting as a bridge between related sub-disciplines such as history of childhood and youth, history and education. It raises practical implications for historians of education as they seek new approaches and understanding of the process of informal education outside the classroom.

This paper suggests that the authors should take more seriously the impact of children’s reading for pleasure. Reception studies offer an insight into recognising the interaction that children have with their chosen reading. While the authors cannot research how children interacted historically with these stories in the mid-twentieth century, the authors can draw implications from the popularity of the genre and the significance of the legacy of the closed school community that has made series such as Harry Potter so successful with the current generation.

The marginal place of history of education within the disciplines of history and education is both challenging and full of possibilities. The paper draws on existing international debates and discusses future directions as well as the potential that girls’ school stories offer for research into gender and education.

Joint reviews are an approach to partnership working between those involved in inspection and regulation. They provide great opportunities and some challenges. This article describes a case study of the review of the National Service Framework for Older People. It discusses culture and commitment, organisational imperatives and governance.

Describes how the British Library Co‐operation and Partnership Programme and a consortium led by Bournemouth University funded a research study to work with public libraries to enhance access to quality‐assured health information for the lay public. The study ran between July 2001 and March 2003. The resulting demonstrator product was Healthinfo4, a unique Web‐based resource developed and designed specifically for the lay public. Focuses on how the internal and external quality assurance and evaluation of the research study was achieved