Harry Ferguson

Despite its huge public profile, surprisingly little is known about child protection work. Discussion focuses on failures that result in children dying, or on what social workers cannot do, due to bureaucratic pressures and limited time. This book examines in detail how social workers can use the time they do have to relate to children and families, make child protection work and create meaningful change. Featuring: • Detailed examination of real-world child protection case studies based on original research; • A new vocabulary for understanding and improving social work and relationship-based practice; • New insights into how to provide effective staff support and supervision; • Original integration of psychoanalytic and sociological perspectives; and • Practical tools for navigating challenges such as working with infants and managing hostile relationships. Sure to become a classic social work text, this book explores how helpful relationships are made and sustained, and how they can be made better. It provides a new ‘forward-facing’ approach, with practical and theoretical insights into how, and under what organisational conditions, relationship-based practice and child protection can be made to work.

Despite its huge public profile, surprisingly little is known about child protection work. Discussion focuses on failures that result in children dying, or on what social workers cannot do, due to bureaucratic pressures and limited time. This book examines in detail how social workers can use the time they do have to relate to children and families, make child protection work and create meaningful change. Featuring: • Detailed examination of real-world child protection case studies based on original research; • A new vocabulary for understanding and improving social work and relationship-based practice; • New insights into how to provide effective staff support and supervision; • Original integration of psychoanalytic and sociological perspectives; and • Practical tools for navigating challenges such as working with infants and managing hostile relationships. Sure to become a classic social work text, this book explores how helpful relationships are made and sustained, and how they can be made better. It provides a new ‘forward-facing’ approach, with practical and theoretical insights into how, and under what organisational conditions, relationship-based practice and child protection can be made to work.

Sail a toy ship across the ocean... Build an igloo... Ollie and Harry Ferguson did it—and you can too! Starting with a list of 500 “adventures”, the Scottish brothers set out to live life to its fullest. They’ve photographed the sea floor, launched a plastic toy into space, mummified fish and tracked wild animals; they’ve gone magnet fishing and camping, sailed aboard a deep-sea diving vessel, caught lobsters, made a bathtub in the woods, crossed the ocean in a toy boat, gone on a meteorite hunt, made a megapult, raised chickens, built an outdoor shelter, sailed a kite boat, built a wildlife reserve, went on a mountain hike and have flown trained falcons. With striking colour photographs and featuring step-by-step directions for some of the boys’ best adventures, this book provides guidance that will inspire families to marvellous adventures of their own.

How do practitioners step up to the professional challenge of keeping children safe? Leading author Harry Ferguson draws on his own research, personal experience and real-life case studies to challenge the way we think about child protection. This highly original and engaging book captures the daily reality of practice within life's most personal spaces, and offers a rare insight into the lived experience of working with vulnerable children, their parents and other carers. An inspiring declaration of the need for a new, intimate approach to child protection, this ground-breaking book lays the foundations of skilful, authoritative practice. It is a must for Social Work student and practitioners within this challenging field.

Operation Kronstadt not only reveals the early days of Britain's intelligence services but uncovers a truly dramatic story from the Russian Revolution involving a daring rescue attempt and a 'mission impossible' against the best defended naval target in Russia.

Social work has laboured too long under a 'deficit' model that focuses on failings and problems of practice. Emphasising best practice, strengths and collaborative partnership this ambitious book seeks to redress the balance. Undergraduate and post-qualifying social work students alike will find it a useful resource.

An explosive attack on a Customs officer triggers a dangerous change in the Liverpool drugs war, and is the start of a new assignment for Harry Ferguson. Leaving behind the Kilos, he joins the Lima team, the 'All-stars' of Customs Investigation Division, and starts with the dealings of John Haase, who runs a heroin network supplied by a Turk named Volkan. But Volkan also supplies an equally ruthless gang in Brixton and the Limas become dangerously stretched trying to keep a grip on the spiralling case in two cities plus the ever-present threat of an attack on the officers themselves. This dramatic true story of an undercover operation has shocks, surprises and an extraordinary twist.

Former MI6 officer Harry Ferguson gives behind the scenes information including things not shown on screen. He shows how to lie without being caught, how to follow someone without being spotted and how to spot those who might be following you. He reveals the secrets of walk-ins, gangplank approaches, false flag operations, dead letter boxes and brush contacts. There are sections on how to construct an alternative identity, how to check your house for bugging devices and your car for bombs, how to disappear in a crowd by 'going grey'and how agents are spotted and recruited. But Spy also goes beyond the techniques of espionage to examine a range of issues facing today's intelligence services - the morality of using assassination and blackmail, the heroes and villains of the espionage world, and how modern terrorists are able to evade detection by Western intelligence organisations. At the end of it all he even tells you how to apply for a job with the real intelligence services.

Protecting Children in Time provides a highly original analysis of the origins and development of the taken-for-granted notion that it is possible through social intervention to protect children from avoidable harm and even death, to protect children in time . By using case-studies which span the past 120 years of 'modern' practices and drawing on the work of leading social theorists of modernity and risk society it provides a new way of thinking about constructions of child abuse as a social problem and child protection as a late-modern expert system and experience. It proposes new ways of conceptualizing relationships between professionals, children at risk and families and deepens our understanding of what effective interventions have to involve.

Protecting Children in Time provides a highly original analysis of the origins and development of the taken-for-granted notion that it is possible through social intervention to protect children from avoidable harm and even death, to protect children in time . By using case-studies which span the past 120 years of 'modern' practices and drawing on the work of leading social theorists of modernity and risk society it provides a new way of thinking about constructions of child abuse as a social problem and child protection as a late-modern expert system and experience. It proposes new ways of conceptualizing relationships between professionals, children at risk and families and deepens our understanding of what effective interventions have to involve.

"Kilo 17" gives the inside story of a close-knit Customs team during a major drugs investigation. As an Oxford-educated, former member of MI6, Harry is promoted straight over the heads of more experienced officers. But with no previous experience of the drugs world, the Kilos think they need Harry like a hole in the head. But Harry sticks at the job and begins to make progress with his investigation into the affairs of Frank Davies, the local Mister Big. And in the long desperate hunt for evidence, involving a transit van smashing through the front window of an Indian restaurant, chance tip-offs, a moonlit search for a missing ex-SAS soldier, a dawn raid on a fortress-like country house and barely legal flights by light aircraft to Holland, the Kilos begin to chip away at Frank Davies' criminal empire.