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Services for adults with learning disabilities are currently based on the promotion of four key principles: rights, independence, choice and social inclusion. This paper will argue that, while these principles are welcome, they need to be balanced against a fifth principle ‐ that vulnerable adults should be adequately protected against the risk of abuse. It will draw on both recent high‐profile cases of violence and abuse against people with learning disabilities and research evidence to explore whether current plans to transform adult social care through the use of self‐directed support and individual budgets offer a safe future.

Care management is a central part of the current health and social care system, but the development of Self‐Directed Support raises significant questions about the future of this function. Moreover, if the current design of the care management function is to change, then this will raise significant challenges and opportunities for those professionals who currently act as care managers. These changes may even allow social workers to return to a way of working that fits better with their professional ethos.

This paper seeks to provide an overview of recent reforms to the social care system in England.

The reforms are described and contextualised within a broader account of the history of social care that includes an analysis of the factors that have encouraged reform.

The current reforms of social care will bring about some benefits but their long‐term impact is still very uncertain. The changing political and economic environment and the inherent difficulties that reform suggests indicate that these changes will be subject to significant differences in interpretation for some time.

This analysis is framed by a set of ethical assumptions about the rights of disabled people and the injustice of arrangements that limit those rights.

The paper encourages practitioners to treat new ideas such as individual budgets and self‐directed support as positive opportunities for improving practice, while being mindful of tensions and unresolved issues that may harm good practice.

This research should help policy‐makers and the general public to avoid misunderstanding the role of these innovations and to better understand when and how these reforms can be used positively.

This paper offers a new and historical perspective on the social care reforms from someone who is closely associated with inventing and implementing those ideas.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of Real Lives: a community interest company that provides peer support for people who face significant mental health challenges using personal budgets.

The paper offers a descriptive summary of the vision behind Real Lives and the successful realisation of this vision in practice based on interviews by the first author with the directors, Operational Manager, Cafe Manager and “Peers and Allies for in Living” who provide support to clients.

The successful development of Real Lives shows that it is possible to utilise peer support and personal budgets to a create small, values based, financially viable organisation outside the statutory sector that is part of its community and can provide outside the statutory sector. A service for people facing significant mental health challenges that is personalised, recovery-focused and puts the client in control and is focused on helping them to do the things they want to do and pursue their aspirations.

Real Lives is an innovative recovery-focused service that is part of its community and offers a model for utilising Self-Directed Support and personal budgets and that might be replicated by others.

This paper aims to present a digest of the main discussion points and key findings from a recent Social Care Institute for Excellence report on risk enablement and safeguarding in the context of self‐directed support and personal budgets.

The paper explores how the personalisation agenda and adult safeguarding can work together in policy and practice and addresses some of the frontline concerns about empowerment and duty of care.

Evidence on how self‐directed support and personal budgets can be used to enable people to take positive risks while staying safe and emerging practice is examined. It suggests that person‐centred working in adult safeguarding, along with the mechanism of self‐directed support planning and outcome review, can support the individual to identify the risks they want to take and those they want to avoid in order to stay safe. It is clear that if frontline practitioners are overly occupied with protecting organisations and individuals from financial abuse, this will impact on the capacity of those practitioners exercising their duty of care at the front line. This means that practitioners are less able to engage with individuals to identify safeguarding issues and enable positive risk taking. Defensive risk management strategies or risk‐averse frontline practice may then result in individuals not being adequately supported to make choices and take control and, therefore, being put at risk. Practitioners need to be supported by local authorities to incorporate safeguarding and risk enablement in their relationship‐based, person‐centred working. Good quality, consistent and trusted relationships and good communication are particularly important for self‐directed support and personal budget schemes.

The use of “risk enablement panels” and “personalisation and safeguarding frameworks” are two ways to address some of the issues in practice.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the new role that human resource developers play in the globally connected workplace. Towards that end, this paper explores the changing landscape of self‐directed learning (SDL) within the digital ecosystem based on the concept of World 2.0.

This paper reviews and builds on the literatures of self‐directed learning and Web 2.0 technologies to explore how self‐directed learning is being transformed in the creative digital era.

The paper outlines five transformations that change the landscape of workplace learning in the creative digital era: virtual collaboration, technological convergence, global connectivity, online communities, and digital creativity.

This paper gives extensive guidance on how HRD specialists and practitioners can transform their strategies to adapt to the training needs of employees in the creative digital era. The paper provides new ideas and vision for industrial trainers and human resource development practitioners on self‐directed learning.

This article provides some future research areas and limitations.

This paper opens up new possibilities for self‐directed learning and discusses how self‐directed learning might be transformed in the light of technological and workplace changes. In particular, self‐directed learning might decrease the HRD/training costs significantly while providing employees with just‐in time training.

This paper aims to discuss the use of self‐directed supported as a way of empowering people living with dementia to have greater control over the support they need.

The authors interviewed social care staff and people living with dementia about their use of self‐directed support.

There have been a number of challenges with making self‐directed support a reality for people with dementia, including the paperwork that can be involved and the time spent setting up a service. However, West Sussex County Council is working on solutions to make sure that self‐directed support becomes a reality for people living with dementia.

The paper highlights some of the positives and obstacles that staff and people living with dementia have faced regarding the use of self‐directed support within West Sussex and the ways that these issues are being overcome.

The purpose of this paper is to test if the effects of a self-directed career attitude on career and life satisfaction are mediated by a person’s sense of calling and moderated by job insecurity in a sample of Chinese employees.

Among a sample of Chinese employees (n=263), in this paper, a moderated mediation analysis with bootstrapping was applied to test the hypotheses.

The results showed that calling mediates the effects of a self-directed career attitude on career satisfaction and life satisfaction. Job insecurity moderated the effect on life satisfaction but not on career satisfaction. The effect on life satisfaction were stronger under higher levels of job insecurity.

These results suggest that a self-directed career attitude may help people develop a calling, which in turn relates to increased subjective career success and well-being. In addition, the notion of a calling may be especially important for well-being in unstable job circumstances.

This study is the first to explore a calling and a self-directed career attitude in a sample of Chinese employees. Corresponding to contemporary China’s rapidly changing context of economy and career development, a self-directed career orientation plays an important role in Chinese employees’ calling and subjective career success.

The purpose of this research is to explore the relationships among self‐directed learning and entrepreneurial learning; and the relationships among entrepreneurial learning and entrepreneurial performance through a literature review. This paper reviews the characteristics of self‐directed learning that are important in supporting entrepreneurial learning. A conceptual framework outlining the relationships among self‐directed learning and entrepreneurial learning is provided to illustrate how these relationships can enhance entrepreneurial performance.

Key words are identified to use in the literature search. All of the several electronic databases available in the online library, including both journal and book sources, are used to search for resources, as well as Google Scholar and Google Search.

Entrepreneurs who learn and develop their self‐management and self‐monitoring skills have more opportunities to enhance entrepreneurial knowledge and experiences in the entrepreneurial development process. The research generates valuable outcomes and findings for future business and entrepreneurship study: self‐directed learning has emerged as an important area of inquiry in relation to entrepreneurial learning, as well as entrepreneurial performance.

The study was exploratory, based on the literature review. Further studies are needed using empirical research to examine why some characteristics of self‐directed learning and entrepreneurial learning are better used to enhance the outcomes of entrepreneurial performance.

The research constructs a conceptual framework to outline the relationships among self‐directed learning, entrepreneurial learning, and entrepreneurial performance. Value was created when self‐directed learning and entrepreneurial learning are identified as the key factors for the entrepreneurial performance.