Robin Sen

Improving Outcomes for Looked after Children: A Critical Analysis of Kinship Care

Although UK law and policy favour family and friends care, the number of children placed in kinship care remains low compared to other countries such as the USA and Australia, and there is professional uncertainty as to whether children may be better placed there. This review compares outcomes for looked after children placed in kin and non-kin care and finds stability is achieved more commonly through placement with kin. However, the inherent familiarity of kinship placements can undermine aspects of care quality. Children are more likely to experience problematic parental contact and problems within a child’s immediate family may exist in the child’s wider network. Despite such adversities, emotional and behavioural outcomes are as favourable, or more favourable. The review concludes that although poor quality kin placements do have adverse effects on children’s emotional and behavioural development, stability is a protective factor. Two areas for the development of professional practice are highlighted. Firstly, the need for professionals to provide better support to children and kin carers. Secondly, the need to end inadequate kin placements, sometimes against a child’s wishes, should be better recognised: in some cases children’s needs have been undermined when social workers have allowed inadequate placements to continue.

Foster Carers' Involvement in Contact: Other Professionals' Views

Legislative and practice guidance in the United Kingdom suggests foster carers are central to effective contact for children in foster care. This article explores the involvement of foster carers in contact between children in their care and their birth parents, drawing on the findings of an in-depth qualitative study of the views and experiences of social workers and Reporters to the Childrens Hearing system in one Scottish local authority. While the study was geographically localised and its findings cannot be generalised, it does provide valuable insight into the residual involvement of foster carers in contact arrangements in the authority in question. Exploring the available literature, the authors go on to consider possible explanations of this residual involvement and what type of social work practice is required to enable foster carers to be more centrally involved in contact arrangements within contemporary constructions of a professional foster care service.

Introduction: Intensive Family Support Services: Politics, Policy and Practice Across Contexts

The last twenty years have seen major international developments in welfare state support and services for children, parents and families. Increases in provision occurred within established areas such as welfare benefits, family allowances, child welfare services and maternity leave entitlements; and new ‘forms and modalities of provision’ were introduced (Daly et al. , 2015 : 10), in particular parental and paternity leave entitlements; welfare-to-work programmes and active labour market policies; conditional cash support schemes; in-work subsidies for low income families; childcare and early education services; earlier intervention and prevention programmes; parenting and family support services; and inter-departmental, inter-professional and inter-agency models of service provision (OECD, 2009 , 2011 ).

Building Relationships in a Cold Climate: A Case Study of Family Engagement within an ‘Edge of Care’ Family Support Service

Drawing on a case study generated as part of a larger evaluation, this article explores engagement between one family and an ‘edge of care’ intensive family support service, within a cold climate of public spending cuts and rising numbers of children in care. The focus on engagement in the case study illustrates theories about relationship building at the ‘edge of care’: the importance of an empathic relationship; harnessing parents’ agency for change while raising child welfare concerns; allowing parents space to maintain a positive self-conception of parenthood while supporting improvements; and engagement with family practices. The case study highlights that, despite the potential disciplinary aspects of intensive family support, the parents valued the ‘edge of care’ service because it provided them with the help they felt they needed, contrasting with their prior experience of statutory child welfare agency practice.

Belonging to the library: humanising the space for social work education

Abstract This article describes the running of four Living Libraries on a UK postgraduate social work course. A Living Library is a metaphoric remodelling of a conventional library where people, as authors of their experiences, provide specialist knowledge based on authorial areas of expertise. In the Living Libraries discussed here, ‘Living Books’ carried stories of social work—their narratives were of lived experiences as people using social care services; as carers in personal relationships with others who use social care services; or, as social work practitioners. The focus of this article is on those Living Libraries involving the participation of the first two of these groups. Drawing on social psychology, phenomenology and human geography, we propose that a Living Library can act as a connective space within social work education by engendering a discursive forum where all participants—people with experiences of services, students, practitioners and social work educators—are given both the freedom and obligation to talk openly about their differential experiences, fears and hopes for social work. Through this process, opportunities are created to consider how improvements that meet all stakeholders’ interests may be achieved.