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Foreword
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- By June Thoburn
- Edited by Robin Sen, University of Edinburgh, Christian Kerr, Leeds Beckett University
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- Book:
- The Future of Children's Care
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 23 January 2024
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2023, pp xii-xiv
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- Chapter
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Summary
I take it as a privilege accorded to the writer of a foreword to an edited collection to make a personal response, a privilege lightly claimed since the editors have in their opening and concluding chapters so fully drawn together and reflected on the individual chapters. Having started my social work career as a child care officer tasked with setting up ‘preventive services’ in the heady days of Section 1 of the 1963 Children and Young Persons Act, I greatly appreciated being welcomed into the Care Review Watch Alliance, a ‘loose collective of care experienced people, care professionals and academics’. With the MacAlister Review published but government intentions not yet known, some members of this collective, along with other fellow travellers, have taken the opportunity offered by this book to move beyond commentary and critique of the Review's processes and conclusions to address the risks of hasty implementation of some of its ill-thought-through recommendations, and to share hopes for the future.
Some readers will, like me, have been on a social media journey with the authors from even before the Review was announced. Though each chapter author is clear about the inequities and harms of the ‘care system’, and the need for considerably more resources as well as changes, when the government announced an ‘independent’ review of ‘the children's social care system’ we were not all at one about the scope of the review that was needed. Should the focus be on children in care and care leavers, or was the ‘care system’ to be taken to include the full range of child and family services as legislated for by the 1989 Act? I recall a Twitter exchange where I expressed concerns that this broad-based review, commissioned by a neoliberal-minded government, that had been seeking for some years to weaken rights to quality, publicly provided and accountable services, could result in harming the balance required by the 1989 Act. Then, as now, balance is essential between helping families within the community, intervening when protective services were needed, and providing good quality care for those whose needs could best be met by out-of-home care.
The writers of the chapters in this powerful book, as researchers, activists and advocates from across children's services, and from personal experience of the ‘care system’, came together in pointing to pitfalls as the shape of the Review emerged.
4 - Continuity and Change in the Knowledge Base For Social Work
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- By June Thoburn
- Edited by Terry Bamford, Keith Bilton
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- Book:
- Social Work
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 18 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 09 June 2020, pp 59-76
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
Given the potentially ambitious scope of the title, this is essentially a personal perspective. It draws on my experiences as: a student on a postgraduate child care officer course in 1962; a child and family and then a generalist ‘patch’ social worker; a social work lecturer and researcher; a board member of the General Social Care Council (GSCC); and in the voluntary sector. References to key texts are woven into a commentary on the changing views between the 1950s and the late 2010s about necessary knowledge for social workers in the early stages of their career. Detailed knowledge needed for more specialist and supervisory roles is beyond the scope of this chapter.
In academic curriculum terms, social work, like public and social policy, law and education, is an applied social science discipline that, over time, has developed its own knowledge base, adding in insights from economics, social history, ethics, sociology, medicine and health sciences, psychology, criminology, demography and management. In broad terms, the areas of knowledge come under the overlapping areas of:
social science disciplines (the socio-political/legal context);
understanding human development and relationships (the internal/ relational world);
theories, approaches and methods for social work practice.
These have to be brought together in response to the social worker's need for an understanding of relationships (within families and communities, with adults and children in need of services and with professionals). In one of the first UK articles addressing this question the founding editor of the British Journal of Social Work, Olive Stevenson (1971, pp 225–37), invited the reader ‘to think in terms of “frames of reference” for understanding and helping people in difficulty. Such frames of reference overlap, complement each other and, at times, conflict.’
At the start of the period explored in this volume, knowledge for practice came mainly from the first two areas, but over time the research base and published literature on the third has greatly expanded. This chapter summarises the early social sciences-dominated phase up to the 1960s before exploring these three ‘frames of reference’ after 1970, when, with the expansion of schools of social work, the balance shifted.
9 - The 1989 England and Wales Children Act: the High-Water Mark of Progressive Reform?
- Edited by Terry Bamford, Keith Bilton
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- Book:
- Social Work
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 18 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 09 June 2020, pp 157-172
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
In the history of children's services a small number of Acts of Parliament can be identified as important exemplars of the dominant social and political eras within which they were framed. The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, the 1948 Children Act and the 1989 Children Act might all be seen as such signposts, as, more recently, can the 2017 Children and Social Work Act. In spite of the deficits that can be identified in the implementation of the 1989 Act, it stands in stark contrast to the patchwork of children's social services legislation across the preceding four decades and, indeed, since, with respect to broader child and family welfare provisions. It incorporates a clear vision for the delivery of child and family social work services, and of the nature of professional child and family social work. Thirty years on, although housing, health, education and social security Bills have come and gone, the 1989 Act remains barely changed. Moreover, it has consistently had an unusually high and very positive profile both in the child care policy literature and in the hearts and minds of social workers, past and present. Accounts of opposition to recent proposals to undermine it, as in the defeated ‘exemption clauses’ in the 2017 Children and Social Work Bill, describe it as ‘carefully crafted’ (Jones, 2019, p 55) and emphasise its evidence-informed design and implementation: ‘the Act had an unusually empirical gestation period’ (Tunstill and Willow, 2017, p 44). The Bill was, after all, first introduced in the House of Lords in the previous year by the Lord Chancellor as:
the most comprehensive and far reaching reform of child care law which has come before Parliament in living memory. It brings together the public and private law concerning the care, protection and upbringing of children and the provision of services to them and their families. (Hansard, HL Deb, 6 December 1988, vol 502, col 488)
That is not to say that everything about its original design or likely implementation process was ever seen as entirely unproblematic.
4 - Re-imagining early help: looking forward, looking back
- Edited by Maggie Blyth
- Foreword by Eileen Munro
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- Book:
- Moving on from Munro
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 03 February 2022
- Print publication:
- 02 April 2014, pp 73-88
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Summary
It is irresponsible not to look back and ask – how did we get here, what has been learned and what has been lost? (Stevenson, 2013, p 98)
Social workers in England remain a vital support for many children and families. They also serve to protect children at risk, making many wise and humane decisions. However, all is not well. Some decisions are not so wise and not so humane and many of these are a product of poorly designed organisational systems and inappropriate institutional cultures. Statutory social work is caught in a perpetual tension between the rights of the many to help and to freedom from unwelcome scrutiny and intrusive intervention in the intimate spaces of family life and the rights of the relatively few who come to serious harm. The precautionary principle is in a constantly discursive and moral dance with proportionality. Each violent and, when viewed retrospectively, tragically preventable death has its own effect on this fickle pendulum. For at least two decades it has swung in a particular direction. Efforts to embed early help more widely in the children's workforce may have been apparent under New Labour in the various Every child matters documentation (Department for Education and Skills, 2003). However, the terms ‘social work’ and ‘social worker’ were conspicuously absent from this swathe of material, which emphasised the non-stigmatising nature of support for children's ‘additional needs’, which were to fall below the threshold of statutory social work. In recent years, social work has become increasingly distanced from most forms of early help and become more strongly identified with child protection, with increased anxiety that support for families will be perceived as losing sight of the child.
For social work, the policy response to high-profile events has been to standardise processes and seek ‘consistent thresholds’. This, it has been argued, would ensure safety in the system. In fact, it has led to a great deal of ‘screening’ behaviour and short-term, multiple assessments in children's services, often at the expense of practical help and sustained relational support (Featherstone et al, 2013). In reality, consistent thresholds are unachievable and, in a dynamic system, probably an entirely undesirable preoccupation.
Children in out-of-home care in Australia: International comparisons
- Clare Tilbury, June Thoburn
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- Journal:
- Children Australia / Volume 33 / Issue 3 / 2008
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 23 February 2012, pp. 5-12
- Print publication:
- 2008
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- Article
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As governments increasingly search globally for strategies to improve child welfare outcomes, it is vital to consider how policies and programs developed in other countries are likely to suit local conditions. Routinely collected child welfare administrative data can provide contextual information for cross-national comparisons. This article examines out-of-home care in Australia compared to other developed countries, and explores possible explanations for differences in patterns and trends. In doing so, it also examines the similarities and differences between NSW, Victoria and Queensland. It is argued that a sound understanding of how out-of-home care is used, the profile of children in care and the influences on data can assist policy makers to match proposed solutions to clearly understood current problems. The imperative is to plan and implement policies and programs that locate out-of-home care within a range of child welfare services that meet the diverse needs of children and families within local contexts.