This book contributes to the understanding of care and care work in children's services in Britain in the early twenty-first century. It provides insights into the factors that influence why people enter and leave care work, their motivations, and the intersection of their work with their family lives. Focusing on four diverse groups of workers – residential social workers, foster carers, family support workers, and community child-minders – who take on the care of vulnerable children and young people in the context of relatively low levels of qualifications, the book examines their life course as care workers. It explores the range of factors that attract people into care work, including the biographical circumstances and the serendipitous factors that propel them into the work, their understandings of and commitment to it, and how their identities as care workers are created and sustained. The book is highly relevant to current policy debates about the development of children's services and reforming the childcare workforce, and offers a range of practical recommendations.