Karen Winter

Making meaningful connections: Using insights from social pedagogy in statutory child and family social work practice

Reports into incidents of child death and serious injury have highlighted consistently that a cause for concern has been the capacity of social workers to communicate skilfully with children. In response, there has been a growing emphasis on training social workers in their communication skills. While a welcome development, training can often be perceived and experienced in terms of obtaining practical tips to aid the verbal and non-verbal communication process. We argue that more fundamental to ‘connected’ communicative encounters are intrinsic qualities that are difficult to identify, define and ‘package’. Using a social pedagogical approach and drawing on data collected as part of an Economic and Social Research Council funded UK-wide, four nations, qualitative study exploring social workers’ communicative practices with children, this paper will consider how social workers manage to connect, or not, with children. The social pedagogical concepts of ‘haltung’ (attitude), ‘head, heart and hands’ and ‘the common third’ are outlined as potentially helpful approaches for understanding the intimacies of inter-personal connections and enhancing social workers’ capacity to establish and sustain meaningful communication and connections with children in the face of austere organisational contexts.

Decision-making Processes in Review Meetings for Children in Care: a Bourdieusian Analysis

In the UK and elsewhere parental and child involvement in social services review processes for children in care is a legal requirement and is seen as an essential mechanism through which the needs of children are identified and longer term plans for their care drawn up. Existing research indicates that despite significant improvements in law, policy and practice to secure greater involvement, and some positive parental and child experiences, important significant barriers remain. The gap between these broader developments and the experiences of many children and their parents suggests the need to reconsider the micro-dynamics within review meetings through which decisions are arrived at. Using Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, field and habitus I report on the analysis of a single case study from a larger research project on the participation rights of young children in care. Applying the concepts provides insight into the social and relational processes that occur within the structured space of the review meeting. The case-study analysis reveals practices by social workers that perpetuate the marginalisation of both parents and children during the review meeting. I argue that theoretically informed research regarding social and relational processes within review meetings is important to improve understanding regarding how and why decisions are arrived at and I suggest that this knowledge could contribute to the development of practice in this area.

Disabled Children in Out of Home Care: Issues and Challenges for Practice.

Despite consistent evidence of great risk of abuse or neglect for disabled children and their over-representation in the public care system, there has been a notable gap in research into the experiences of disabled children in contact with child protection services or placed in out-of-home care (Dowling, Kelly & Winter, 2013). This chapter discusses findings from a qualitative study that sought to address this gap in knowledge by investigating the experiences of disabled children living in out-of-home care. The chapter will explore the complexities of family support permanence, participation and access to specialist services, drawing on the views of disabled children and young people, their birth parents/carers and social workers. Finally, we will explore the implications of the study findings in relation to theorising disabled childhoods and informing critical approaches to working with disabled children in out-of-home care.

The reliability and validity of a child and adolescent participation in decision-making questionnaire

BACKGROUND There is a growing impetus across the research, policy and practice communities for children and young people to participate in decisions that affect their lives. Furthermore, there is a dearth of general instruments that measure children and young peoples views on their participation in decision-making. This paper presents the reliability and validity of the Child and Adolescent Participation in Decision-Making Questionnaire (CAP-DMQ) and specifically looks at a population of looked-after children, where a lack of participation in decision-making is an acute issue. METHODS The participants were 151 looked after children and adolescents between 10-23 years of age who completed the 10 item CAP-DMQ. Of the participants 113 were in receipt of an advocacy service that had an aim of increasing participation in decision-making with the remaining participants not having received this service. RESULTS The results showed that the CAP-DMQ had good reliability (Cronbachs alpha = 0.94) and showed promising uni-dimensional construct validity through an exploratory factor analysis. The items in the CAP-DMQ also demonstrated good content validity by overlapping with prominent models of child and adolescent participation (Lundy 2007) and decision-making (Halpern 2014). A regression analysis showed that age and gender were not significant predictors of CAP-DMQ scores but receipt of advocacy was a significant predictor of scores (effect size d = 0.88), thus showing appropriate discriminant criterion validity. CONCLUSION Overall, the CAP-DMQ showed good reliability and validity. Therefore, the measure has excellent promise for theoretical investigation in the area of child and adolescent participation in decision-making and equally shows empirical promise for use as a measure in evaluating services, which have increasing the participation of children and adolescents in decision-making as an intended outcome.