Abstract
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.
Highlights
Child welfare policy makers and practitioners in most high income countries increasingly share the view that an important aim for children who need out-of-home care and are unable to return to their birth parent/s is for them to become members of alternative families (Fernandez & Barth, 2010; Gilbert, Parton, & Skivenes, 2011; Petrie, Boddy, Cameron, Wigfall, & Simon, 2006)
In order to better understand similarities and differences in policy and practice with respect to long term planning for children who may need out-of-home care, and for children who are unable to return to parents, it is first necessary to analyze the data on children in care on a given date and children entering care during a given year in England and Norway
In this paper we have noted that the policy aims and underlying practice principles espoused by child welfare managers and workers in Norway and England have many similarities
Summary
Child welfare policy makers and practitioners in most high income countries increasingly share the view that an important aim for children who need out-of-home care and are unable to return to their birth parent/s is for them to become members of alternative families (Fernandez & Barth, 2010; Gilbert, Parton, & Skivenes, 2011; Petrie, Boddy, Cameron, Wigfall, & Simon, 2006). In Norway, ‘stability’ was an aim of the 1992 Child Welfare Act, but permanence outside the birth family was less evident in policy statements there until the early 2000s. In this paper we examine the reasoning behind permanence policies and their manifestation in current legislation and recent policy statements in England and Norway, and explore some evidence of public opinion about permanency options for children in care. Norway and England in their work (Gilbert et al, 2011; Thoburn, Robinson, & Anderson, 2012) this paper provides a further contribution by exploring ‘permanence policies’ in more detail
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