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In this chapter, I ask what catching up means in the practice of collaborative policymaking. During ethnographic fieldwork among municipal policymakers and semi-public managers in child and family services in the Netherlands, I found the central actors constantly catching up. These are not interactions that we generally see in accounts of public policymaking, nor has this ‘mundane’ activity been systematically analysed. Based on many hours of participant observation, and illustrated through a composite narrative, I demonstrate how catching serves to construct the participants’ identity (who am I in this meeting), and relationship (what is our relation in this meeting), and to make sense of the specific situation of the meeting (what is it we are doing here) and of the larger ‘world’ beyond (what has happened and might structure what we will be doing here). I argue that catching up is a connective practice, connecting temporalities, spaces, knowledge and people. Within its actions, the informal and the formal are entangled.

English social work policies and regulatory bodies propel critical reflection as a professional requirement and a worthwhile activity. The purpose of this paper is to report on the current international and UK evidence that informs the understanding and use of critical reflection and associated terms – reflection, reflective practice and reflective supervision – in one-to-one practitioner supervision in local authority children and families social work in England.

A review of the evidence was undertaken using documentary policy analysis and a scholastic literature review to examine the history and current knowledge available as of December 2022.

The historical policy and professional context of critical reflection in one-to-one supervision in England is discussed. The current evidence review identified three themes – the role of critical reflection in models of supervision, the influences of national, organisational and professional cultures and the supervisor practitioner relationship. The nuanced nature of the presence of critical reflection in supervision and a lack of clarity when theorising and describing critical reflection has implications for policy, supervisory practice and research design.

Critical reflection in one-to-one social work supervision is under researched. This review draws on the evidence from international research and local policy to offer an understanding of the complexity of theorising, practicing and researching critical reflection in one-to-one supervision in local authority children and families social work in England.

High levels of child obesity alongside rising stunting and the absence of a coherent food policy have deemed UK’s food system to be broken. The National Food Strategy (NFS) was debated intensely in media, with discussions on how and who should fix the food system.

Using a mixed methods approach, the authors conduct framing analysis on traditional media and sentiment analysis of twitter reactions to the NFS to identify frames used to shape food system policy interventions.

The study finds evidence that the media coverage of the NFS often utilised the tropes of “culture wars” shaping the debate of who is responsible to fix the food system – the government, the public or the industry. NFS recommendations were portrayed as issues of free choice to shift the debate away from government action correcting for market failure. In contrast, the industry was showcased as equipped to intervene on its own accord. Dietary recommendations made by the NFS were depicted as hurting the poor, painting a picture of helplessness and loss of control, while their voices were omitted and not represented in traditional media.

British media’s alignment with free market economic thinking has implications for food systems reform, as it deters the government from acting and relies on the invisible hand of the market to fix the system. Media firms should move beyond tropes of culture wars to discuss interventions that reform the structural causes of the UK’s broken food systems.

As traditional media coverage struggles to capture the diversity of public perception; the authors supplement framing analysis with sentiment analysis of Twitter data. To the best of our knowledge, no such media (and social media) analysis of the NFS has been conducted. The paper is also original as it extends our understanding of how media alignment with free market economic thinking has implications for food systems reform, as it deters the government from acting and relies on the invisible hand of the market to fix the system.