Making Social Work Work: Improving social work for vulnerable families and children without parental care around the world: A literature review

This literature review calls for families and children in developing countries to be supported in ways that are appropriate to the conditions, culture and resources available rather than through approaches to social work that are common in the west. Children living without, or at risk of losing, parental care have wide and varied needs, this paper highlights the need for more thorough assessments of appropriate approaches, functions and support needs for social workers, and suggests elements of an assessment tool to explore these issues. This paper is the first part of a longer process for developing such an assessment tool, and plans are underway to further develop and test the tool in 2012.- See more at: http://www.everychild.org.uk/resources/reports-policies/making-social-work-work#sthash.4EF6qnzc.dpu

Improving child protection : a systematic review of training and procedural interventions

Aim: To synthesise published evidence regarding the effectiveness of training and procedural interventions aimed at improving the identification and management of child abuse and neglect by health professionals. Methods: Systematic review for the period 1994 to 2005 of studies that evaluated child protection training and procedural interventions. Main outcome measures were learning achievement, attitudinal change, and clinical behaviour. Results: Seven papers that examined the effectiveness of procedural interventions and 15 papers that evaluated training programmes met the inclusion criteria. Critical appraisal showed that evaluation of interventions was on the whole poor. It was found that certain procedural interventions (such as the use of checklists and structured forms) can result in improved recording of important clinical information and may also alert clinical staff to the possibility of abuse. While a variety of innovative training programmes were identified, there was an absence of rigorous evaluation of their impact. However a small number of onegroup pre- and post-studies suggest improvements in a range of attitudes necessary for successful engagement in the child protection process. Conclusion: Current evidence supports the use of procedural changes that improve the documentation of suspected child maltreatment and that enhance professional awareness. The lack of an evidence based approach to the implementation of child protection training may restrict the ability of all health professionals to fulfil their role in the child protection process. Formal evaluation of a variety of models for the delivery of this training is urgently needed with subsequent dissemination of results that highlight those found to be most effective

Improving Children’s Literacy Through Indonesian Fairy Tales at Rumah Pintar Yafsi

Rumah Pintar YAFSI is one of the programs managed by Yayasan Fajar Sejahtera Indonesia to help develop character education and child protection programs in the community. Increasing literacy interest in children is an important aspect of character education that must be instilled. Improving children's literacy requires adequate facilities and education of high quality. As a result, in this service activity, the team has provided goods and services to the Rumah Pintar YAFSI, namely the assistance of Indonesian fairy tale books and storytelling training services for Rumah Pintar YAFSI volunteers to further strengthen children's interest in literacy. This is also an effort to achieve inclusive education for children of all socioeconomic backgrounds. The lecture method approach, question and answer or discussion, and deductive model training methods are used in the implementation. This community service improves Rumah Pintar YAFSI volunteers' storytelling skills, which in turn increases children's literacy interest in Rumah Pintar YAFSI. The outcomes of this activity have also been documented in written reports and videos. Furthermore, activities are reported in national online newspapers

Improving practice : child protection as a systems problem

This paper argues for treating the task of improving the child protection services as a systems problem, and for adopting the system-focused approach to investigating errors that has been developed in areas of medicine and engineering where safety is a high priority. It outlines how this approach differs from the traditional way of examining errors and how it leads to different types of solutions. Traditional inquiries tend to stop once human error has been found whereas a systems approach treats human error as the starting point and examines the whole context in which the operator was working to see how this impacted on their ability to perform well. The article outlines some factors that seem particularly problematic and worthy of closer analysis in current child protection services. A better understanding of the factors that are adversely effecting practitioners’ level of performance offers the potential for identifying more effective solutions. These typically take the form of modifying the tasks so that they make more realistic and feasible demands on human cognitive and emotional abilities

Early years : subject profile (SPICe briefing; 11/51)

"This subject profile provides an introduction to services for pre-school children. It updates and expands SB 06/83 published in October 2006. Early Years refers to pre-school education, child health, children‟s social work and childcare. The main policy document – the Early Years Framework covers 0-8 years whereas childcare policy covers 0 – 14 years and policy often makes a distinction between pre-birth, birth to 3, 3 to 4 and school age children. This briefing focuses on 0 to 5 years and so does not cover ante-natal, school services or childcare for school age children except where these are also provided to pre-five children" -- front cover