Part of the "Society Now" series, this adopts an "historical overview" approach to the subject of welfare provision, mainly in Britain, Europe and America. It is, however, a sociological approach, providing a mixture of empirical data and theoretical interpretation (perspectives, theories in context and so forth). The final chapter examines two case studies based around ethnicity and age. If you keep in mind the fact that the text is now 15 years out of date (and a lot has happened to welfare in this period), this is a good general introduction to most of the issues, theories and arguments surrounding welfare provision in Western societies.

Although not an A-level text, as such, there's a wealth of material here (both empirical and theoretical) for the teacher who wants to put developments in welfare into an historical, cross-cultural and politco-economic context. If you're not feeling that ambitious, the text is also useful for the wide range of simple definitions it offers for concepts such as "Welfare State", "Social Wage", "Absolute and Relative Poverty" and the like.

In his introduction, Moore notes that an A-level textbook covering social welfare is desperately needed and sadly lacking (probably because its only recently that AEB has split "Health" and "Welfare" into two separate syllabus sections - which means that teachers are actually starting to teach one or other of them, rather than going for the smaller, more-easily-managed (and probably more-interesting), options. I suspect that IBS teachers are also more-inclined to teach Welfare because it easily integrates into the compulsory Social Differentiation focus of the syllabus. In this book Moore has created a wide-ranging, general-purpose text that explicitly adopts the style of his (deservedly) successful "Sociology Alive!" GCSE text - big headings / sub-headings, short chunks of clearly-labelled text and those endearingly-crappy extracts and diagrams that look as though they’ve been assembled on an old Amstrad Wordprocessor. It covers a wide range of areas and issues and can be used as a standard textbook or something to dip into from time to time. Overall, a book that makes teaching this particular syllabus area a lot easier...