This volume has been put together to mark – and indeed celebrate – the 35th anniversary of the publication of Bailey and Brake's (1975) Radical social work. Bailey and Brake's work has become one of the few great, seminal texts of social work in Britain. Today, even those hostile to the general direction of the argument presented in the book, are willing to concede that the book had a significant impact on debates over social work theory and practice in the 1970s and 1980s.

Reading the text today there is no doubt that some of the chapters are shaped by the language and concerns of the 1970s Left. But in its emphasis on the iniquities of the social structure of capitalist society, the challenge it posed to state directed bureaucratic welfare, and its emphasis on the public and social causes of private pain, it was contesting and reshaping many of the dominant assumptions of social work theory. In doing so, it was in contrast to previously dominant perspectives that saw social problems in terms of individual failing and moral ineptitude on the part of ‘problem communities’.

As Roy Bailey points out in his foreword, the book was the first of a number of texts that offered a radical interpretation of social work theory, practice and intervention in the mid-1970s. Its publication reflected three significant and interconnected developments.

First, in the aftermath of the Kilbrandon (SHHD/SED, 1964) and Seebhom (1968) Reports, integrated social service/social work departments developed and created significant job opportunities for qualified workers. In response, higher education institutions expanded their social work course provision. Increasing numbers of social work students, however, then found themselves on courses where the traditional literature and theory base was found wanting. Psychological and medical accounts of clients and their problems were increasingly questioned and ridiculed by the new student cohorts (Jones, this volume). Instead students looked to new ideas that were emerging in the social sciences – ideas steeped in Marxist, feminist, countercultural and social constructionist perspectives that flourished in the early 1970s. Bailey and Brake put the book together to counter the traditional approaches to social work, to bring leading perspectives from the social sciences to social work and, by so doing, give students on courses the ammunition they needed to challenge the dominant theory base espoused on their courses.