If you look in the jobs section of Community Care magazine you'll see a lot of ads all, more or less, on the same theme. Come to x,y,z to work because a/ we are three-star, b/ housing is cheap, c/ no stress, just rolling fields (even if it's for an inner city sometimes!) And the pics of children, families, disabled people are supposedly providing the background to why you should work for that authority. As a former social worker, I'm sure service users and practioners will agree that social care is not all 'smiley, touchy, feely'. It's often about the struggle to survive, be it through poverty, disability or a thousand other reasons. So let's get real you design and PR agencies serving local authorities. Tell it as it is, and less of the rolling fields.
While we are out at the boozer, or enjoying a game of cricket, or whatever we do in our free time, spare a thought for the people who care for friends or relatives on a daily basis. These carers may well hold down full-time jobs and care at evenings or weekends or even give up jobs to care full time. Some are school students who mix caring with A-levels. They save the government hundreds of millions of pounds and are the unsung heroes of communities across the country.
Just to let all our users know that, in order to work around an Internet Explorer bug, I've made a minor change to the way the main site works today. Now, when you have bought a picture licence and go to click the 'download hi-res' button you will see a box which will prompt you to open, save or cancel the hi-res download. Normally you should just choose 'save' and then store the hi-res file in the location of your choice. Previously the hi-res version would appear as an image in the browser window and you would then save it from there. However some people ran into a bug whereby IE wouldn't save it in the right format, necessitating this change.