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This paper seeks to consider the inter‐connections between law and child development, particularly in the areas of child custody and child protection, in both the USA and the UK.

The paper is based on analysis of US and UK legal systems and child developmental research.

Although the two legal systems have much in common in their approach to safeguarding children's welfare, there are also notable differences between them in terminology and in concept. Whereas the USA places a greater emphasis on the rights, particularly autonomy rights, of both parents and children, the UK justifies its laws affecting children largely in terms of parental responsibility and child need.

The paper argues that each of these legal regimes has something to learn from the other and a reader interested in thinking about the relationship between child welfare and law will profit from considering the distinctions, as well as the commonalities, between the two regimes.

The economic reforms which turned the centrally planned economy to a market economy have profoundly changed the tripartite relationship between the state, work unit, and citizen in urban China and brought significant changes to the institutional care provision for young children. The aim of this paper is to investigate the changes to the institutional care since 1980, with particular emphasis on the most recent years from mid‐1990s, and explore how the institutional care has changed over the recent decades without a clear institutional basis.

The analysis draws on second‐hand materials from published literature, a range of longitudinal national and local statistics and policy documents, and also on first‐hand information which was collected in Beijing from in‐depth interviews with key informants and case studies of different kinds of kindergartens.

The paper finds that the previous work‐unit based public care system has changed to a much more complicated care mix in which the roles of the state, employer, community, market and the informal sector of the family in terms of provision and funding have all changed significantly.

The findings of this paper may help to inform appropriate policy responses in Chinese child care provision. The study suggests that formal care provision should be expanded towards universal access regardless of people's income and employment status in China.

The paper questions and complicates the “state withdrawal” representation of social welfare change and argues that it is not “the state” but “the work unit and community organization” retreat from public care provision. It also argues that the change in the role of the state has been multifaceted, and not a simple one‐directional movement of marketization in which the state retreated from welfare provision in entirety.

IF we count the University of Strathclyde School of Librarianship as a “new” school—rather than simply an old school transferred from a College of Commerce to a university—then four “new” schools were established between 1963 and 1964, three of the four in universities and the other closely linked with a university, though remaining independent. All four schools have their special features but I consider the more significant of Belfast's features to be its right, from the outset, to conduct all its own examinations for graduates and non‐graduates. Queen's was also the first British university to provide non‐graduates with courses in librarianship. (Strathclyde is the second.) All successful students are eligible for admission to the Register of Chartered Librarians (ALA) after they have completed the prescribed period of practical experience.

FOR the student who has to choose a field of study in which to learn and exercise his bibliographic skills Sociology affords an interesting and attractive challenge. Indeed, to understand his chosen profession it must necessarily be placed within its social context. Most students at some stage of their development reflect on the social problems that beset the human situation, and some, as the mass media would have us believe, are anxious to remould the “sorry scheme of things” as represented by the existing social structure.

THE Newcastle school, like most others, was established after the second world war to provide full‐time education in librarianship as an alternative to the part‐time system which until 1946 was the only one available to the majority of librarians. At first most of the students were returning servicemen whose library careers had been interrupted by the war and they were followed by students direct from libraries, universities and schools. From a handful of students and one full‐time member of staff in the first year the school has grown steadily until there were 53 students and five staff during the session 1962–3 which was the last course held for the Registration Examination.