Donald Forrester

What is the Impact of Public Care on Children's Welfare? A Review of Research Findings from England and Wales and their Policy Implications

The outcomes for children in public care are generally considered to be poor. This has contributed to a focus on reducing the number of children in care: a goal that is made explicit in the provisions of the current Children and Young Persons Bill. Yet while children in care do less well than most children on a range of measures, such comparisons do not disentangle the extent to which these difficulties pre-dated care and the specific impact of care on child welfare. This article explores the specific impact of care through a review of British research since 1991 that provides data on changes in child welfare over time for children in care. Only 12 studies were identified, indicating a lack of research in this important area. The studies consistently found that children entering care tended to have serious problems but that in general their welfare improved over time. This finding is consistent with the international literature. It has important policy implications. Most significantly it suggests that attempts to reduce the use of public care are misguided, and may place more children at risk of serious harm. Instead, it is argued that England and Wales should move toward a Scandinavian system of public care, in which care is seen as a form of family support and is provided for more rather than fewer children and families.

How Well Prepared are Newly Qualified Social Workers for Working with Substance Use Issues? Findings from a National Survey in England

There is limited research in the United Kingdom on how well prepared social workers are for working with substance use issues. This study set out to explore the views of newly qualified social workers on the extent to which their qualifying programme prepared them for practice with people using alcohol or drugs. It also sought to identify their future training needs and identify examples of good practice among qualifying programmes. A self-completion questionnaire was developed and disseminated via email to 2,914 newly qualified social workers in England; 284 questionnaires were returned. Findings suggested that most respondents considered themselves inadequately prepared for working with substance use and misuse issues. They reported having very little input during qualifying education and identified a range of future training needs. Few examples of good practice were identified. In light of these findings, social work academics and employers need to recognise this serious gap in knowledge and act quickly to ensure social workers are able to meet their service users’ needs confidently and competently.

Monitoring children's rights globally: can child abuse be measured internationally?†

UNICEF is developing indicators to measure the compliance of signatory states with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989. This article explains the role of international indicators in relation to the reporting process integral to the Convention. It then discusses the possibility of developing an indicator to measure child maltreatment globally. Practical and definitional obstacles are considered and measures suggested by other authors, including the rate of child homicide, are critically considered. The article concludes that at present there is no valid measure that allows child maltreatment to be measured globally but that a number of positive steps can be taken to promote awareness and measurement of child maltreatment internationally and these are discussed. Copyright

What happens in child and family social work supervision

Supervision is fundamental to the social work profession. However, increasing concern has been expressed over the managerial capture of local authority social work and the use of supervision as a way of enabling management oversight (or surveillance) of practice. Despite the importance of supervision, we have little evidence about what happens when managers and child and family social workers meet to discuss casework and less about how supervision influences practice. In this study, 34 supervision case discussions were recorded. Detailed descriptions are given of what happens in supervision. Overall, case discussions operated primarily as a mechanism for management oversight and provided limited opportunity for reflection, emotional support or critical thinking. With reference to organizational context, it is suggested that these deficits result from a system that focuses too much on ‘what and when’ things happen and not enough on ‘how and why’.

Navigating ethical moments when researching substance misuse with parents and their children

This article explores the relationship between ethical procedures and ethics in practice in a research project with parents and children from 27 families who had received a social intervention based on their substance misuse and concerns about the protection of their children. We draw on the ‘ethics of care’ to argue that ethical practices are relational, interactive, responsive and, at times, reciprocal. While ethical regulation provides an important opportunity to anticipate ethical issues and build safeguards for participants and researcher, the regulatory process tends to focus on the ethical actions of the researcher rather than the researched. In this article, we demonstrate how ethical decisions were made through, by or alongside participants, drawing on examples of access, consent, protection from harm and negotiating the presence of others in interviews.

What is the extent and nature of quantitative research in British social work

This Brief Note reports on a survey of the extent and nature of quantitative research reported in the British Journal of Social Work over a recent five-year period. There has been considerable emphasis in social work in the UK and elsewhere on developing ‘evidencebased’ practice (Sheldon, 2001; Webb, 2001). While strongly supportive of rigorous research as a basis for social work intervention, Sheldon and Macdonald (1999) have been critical of the extent to which social work can currently be understood to be an evidencebased discipline. They reviewed articles in the British Journal of Social Work during the 1990s and found that most contained no empirical data, and that those that did tended to have small samples and no comparison group. In the 356 papers they reviewed there were only five outcome studies and no controlled trials (Sheldon and Macdonald, 1999). This brief review updates this earlier study and was undertaken as part of the preparation for a practitioner training intervention study.

Facilitating the development of social work in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan A collaboration between Jordan and the UK

English This article reports on a collaboration between Jordan and the UK to develop social work as a profession in Jordan. Reflecting on some of the less anticipated outcomes of the project and the mutual benefits of engaging with cross-cultural alliances, the article is contextualized within debates around post-colonialism and the indigenization of practice. French Cet article présente une collaboration jordano-britannique visant le développement de la profession du travail social en Jordanie. Il apporte une réflexion sur certains des résultats les plus inattendus du projet ainsi que sur les bienfaits retirés de part et d’autre de cette alliance interculturelle. La présente réflexion se situe dans le contexte d’un débat touchant le post-colonialisme et l’adaptation des pratiques aux différents milieux d’exercice. Spanish Se informa sobre una colaboración entre Jordania y el Reino Unido en el desarrollo profesional del trabajo social. Se reflexiona sobre algunas consecuencias del proyecto que no fueron anticipadas, así como los beneficios mutuos de crear alianzas culturales. El ensayo toma en consideración el contexto de los debates acerca del post-colonialismo y las prácticas indígenas.

Transnational collaboration: Evaluation of a social work training workshop in Jordan

This article presents an evaluation of a training workshop on developing social work in Jordan. Literature on transnational collaboration provided a context for the initiative.The evaluation outcomes highlight the transition from informal support to the need for a more structured professional response to social problems.

Describing the needs of children presenting to children's services: issues of reliability and validity

Childrens social services in England and Wales deal with a wide range of referrals of children who are or may be ‘in need’. Finding ways of describing the issues that present in such referrals is important if we wish to understand the nature of the work of childrens services and explore different interventions and outcomes. Yet there have been few attempts to describe the full range of needs presenting to social services, and no studies of the reliability or validity of attempts to define the types of need. In this article the legal definitions of need, a typology developed by Sinclair et al, a related one used by the Department of Health and one developed within the current study were compared for reliability and construct validity. There were two main findings. First, it was found that while the presence of needs could generally be agreed on in all the schemes, ascriptions of a ‘main’ need were not made reliably. This is important because a ‘main’ need has been used in both research and statistical returns to government. Second, while existing schemes appeared well suited to describing allocated cases, they were less able to describe the range of needs presenting in all referrals to social services.

Validity of the Working Alliance Inventory Within Child Protection Services

The Working Alliance Inventory remains a widely studied measure of quality of therapeutic relationships between the practitioner and client. No prior study has examined the psychometrics and validity of the Working Alliance Inventory–Short (WAI-S) in a sample of families, social workers, and trained observers within child protection services. Surveys were completed by 130 families, social workers concerning 274 cases, and observers following 165 home visits during the first wave of data collected from a randomized controlled trial of child protection services. Confirmatory factor analyses were conducted on three versions of the WAI-S and demonstrated moderate to good model fit. Convergent construct validity was found with other standardized measures. Results support the use of the WAI-S during in child protection services practice and research. Future research into family engagement in child protection social work services should focus on the working relationship.