Assessing parental capacity when there are concerns about an unborn child: pre-birth assessment guidance and practice in England

Assessment where there are concerns that an unborn child is likely to suffer significant harm is one of the most difficult tasks that social workers undertake; the legal and ethical context makes the process of assessment and intervention during this period complex. This paper explores pre-birth assessment guidance and practice in England. Local safeguarding guidance in 147 English localities was accessed and analysed, and interviews were conducted with 22 practitioners involved in pre-birth assessments. The findings showed that while most local safeguarding guidance was more detailed and explicit than the national guidance, legal and ethical issues were rarely addressed. Interview data showed that, in general, guidance to support social work assessments during the pre-birth period was insufficient, and that few practitioners used standardised tools to aid assessment. Some practitioners regarded pre-birth assessments as less urgent than cases involving infants/older children, thereby increasing delays in decision-making. It is concluded that existing guidance and practice with regard to pre-birth assessment are inadequate

Student help seeking from pastoral care in UK high schools: a qualitative study

Background Little is known about high school students' perceptions of school-based pastoral support. This study aimed to explore this in the context of a high school–based emotional support project. Methods Qualitative interviews explored perspectives on help seeking of students (N = 23) and staff (N = 27) in three UK high schools where a pastoral project was introduced. Data were analysed thematically. Results Student peer groups perceived help seeking as a sign of weakness. However, students valued learning skills in managing emotions and friendships. Staff expressed concerns about students' ability to help seek proactively, and highlighted organisational influences on pastoral support. Conclusions Increasing student control over the process, and involving trusted staff, could encourage help seeking in high school. It is possible to access the views of students who do not help seek, to improve understanding of help-seeking behaviour

Independence and effectiveness: Messages from the role of Independent Reviewing Officers in England

This paper draws on research into the role of Independent Reviewing Officers (IROs) in England, exploring the dimensions and challenges of their ‘independence’. IROs are specialist social workers whose function is to review the cases of children in public care and ensure that they have appropriate plans and that these plans are being implemented in a timely manner. IROs are ‘independent’ in the sense that they are not the social worker to whom a child’s case is allocated, and do not have line management responsibility for the case, however they are employed by the same local authority. There are detailed regulations and government guidelines on their role, and high expectations, but what does independence mean in this context? The paper draws on a mixed methods study conducted by the authors in 2012-14, which included a survey of 122 files of children in care from four local authorities; interviews with 54 social workers, 54 IROs, 15 parents, and 15 young people; six focus groups; and nationally-distributed questionnaires for IROs (65), social work managers (46) and children’s guardians (39). The study found five dimensions of independence: professional, operational, perceived, institutional and effective. The IROs and social workers generally took more nuanced and pragmatic approaches to their inter-professional working than prescribed in the policy guidance or the pronouncements of politicians and judges, seeing this as more likely to be effective. IROs are not, and cannot be, the solution to all the problems that exist in services for children in care, and the other professionals involved should not be seen as necessarily any less capable or committed to the best interests of the children. Rather, the IRO is part of an interactive system of checks and balances which, together, may increase the likelihood that professional judgement will be exercised effectively on the child’s behalf

A question of quality: do children from disadvantaged backgrounds receive lower quality early childhood education and care?

This paper examines how the quality of early childhood education and care accessed by three and four year olds in England varies by children’s background. Focusing on the free entitlement to early education, the analysis combines information from three administrative datasets for 2010-11, the Early Years Census, the Schools Census and the Ofsted inspections dataset, to obtain two main indicators of quality: staff qualification levels and Ofsted ratings. These data are combined with child-level indicators of area deprivation (IDACI scores) as a proxy measure of children’s background. The paper finds that children from more disadvantaged areas have access to better qualified staff, largely because they are more likely than children from richer areas to attend maintained nursery classes staffed by teachers, and less likely to attend services in the private, voluntary and independent (PVI) sectors. However, within both maintained and PVI sectors, services catering for more disadvantaged children receive poorer quality ratings from Ofsted, with a higher concentration of children from disadvantaged areas itself appearing to reduce the likelihood of top Ofsted grades. This may be in part because Ofsted ratings reflect levels of child development, and therefore reward settings where children enter at a more advanced starting point, but it may also be that it is genuinely harder to deliver an outstanding service to a more disadvantaged intake. The result point to the need for funding to support better qualified staff in PVI settings in disadvantaged areas

Integrating the teaching, learning and assessment of communication with children within the qualifying social work curriculum

Qualifying social work education must provide students with a variety of experiential, personalized, participatory, didactic and critically reflective learning opportunities across both the taught curriculum and in practice placements if deep learning of the capabilities needed for effective communication with children and young people is to be ensured. At present, programmes in England are not consistent in the curriculum structures, content and pedagogical approaches they are employing to teach and assess this topic. This paper discusses first how current proposals for the reform of qualifying education in England do not address the ambiguities and discretion in regulatory guidance, which have meant that the place and relevance of this topic within the curriculum remain uncertain and contested. It then draws on a model of the sequencing of students' learning and development in qualifying training, developed through the author's recent empirical research, to present an integrated and coherent approach to the teaching, learning and assessment of this topic. It is proposed that this strategy will enable students to develop the generic, ‘child-focused’ and ‘applied child-specialist’ capabilities they need for the ‘knowing’, ‘being’ and ‘doing’ of effective communication with children

Pathways to permanence in England and Norway: A critical analysis of documents and data

The English language term ‘permanence’ is increasingly used in high income countries as a ‘short-hand’ translation for a complex set of aims around providing stability and family membership for children who need child welfare services and out-of-home care. From a scrutiny of legislative provisions, court judgments, government documents and a public opinion survey on child placement options, the paper draws out similarities and differences in understandings of the place of ‘permanence’ within the child welfare discourse in Norway and England. The main differences are that in England the components of permanence are explicitly set out in legislation, statutory guidance and advisory documents whilst in Norway the terms ‘stability’ and ‘continuity’ are used in a more limited number of policy documents in the context of a wide array of services available for children and families. The paper then draws on these sources, and on administrative data on children in care, to tease out possible explanations for the similarities and differences identified. We hypothesise that both long-standing policies and recent changes can be explained by differences in public and political understandings of child welfare and the balance between universal services and those targeted on parents and children identified as vulnerable and in need of specialist services

'Respect Study' the Treatment of Religious Difference and Otherness: An ethnographic investigation in UK schools

Understanding and appreciating the beliefs and practices of others feature prominently among the aims and purposes of Religious Education in UK schools. Drawing on ethnographic data from the ‘Does RE Work?’ project, this paper presents two conceptions if ‘in/entoleration’ a deliberate process of inculcating tolerance in pedagogy. Entoleration, akin to enculturation, encourages sympathetic and transformative encounter with others’ beliefs. Intoleration, akin to indoctrination, risks eliding both difference and encounter in the service of a pre-determined aim of nurturing uncritical tolerance. The former is categorised by pedagogies of encounter with the other as person, while the latter often focuses on externals and strangeness