Qualified social workers who work with children could increasingly be based in schools, according to proposals laid out in the Labour Party's manifesto.

The manifesto sets out an overarching ambition to link social work jobs with the education services. As the manifesto terms, it would involve "increasingly co-locating wider childrens services with schools"; effectively moving offices into schools and colleges, closer to the relevant service users.

Labour's manifesto proposes several other changes to how social work jobs are managed to provide services to the young and vulnerable.

The Care2Work programme - where care leavers are supported through to employment by a qualified social worker - would be expanded, as would the system of specialised foster care for the children thought to be most vulnerable. Youth justice would be altered by the expansion of Youth Conditional Cautions, focused on rehabilitation and reparation and reform of antisocial behaviour orders for under 16s.

Family intervention projects would become compulsory for the 50,000 most dysfunctional families identified by the country's social work system. Although this would place added emphasis on direct intervention in social work, Labour hopes that this could be an effective solution to serious cases of abuse and neglect among families - something that has become a highly visible issue for social care and social work in the UK over the past year.