Unpaid carers supporting people with mental health difficulties experience profound psychological and physical strain. These pressures are intensified by systemic neglect, stigma, and isolation, contributing to heightened anxiety, chronic stress, and reduced wellbeing. This study draws on qualitative narrative interviews with 15 unpaid carers engaged with Mind in Bexley services and an exhibition for National Carers Week. The analysis examines how peer support operates as a protective infrastructure, enabling carers to cope with uncertainty, rebuild identity, and reduce isolation through shared experience, support, and collective belonging. Informed by social support theory, resilience frameworks, social identity theory, and the Helper Therapy Principle, the study explores how carers negotiate their roles, reclaim agency, and foster community. Findings highlight the importance of embedding peer support within integrated care systems. The paper argues for including carers and peer networks in emerging integrated neighbourhood models across England, where ‘integrators’ can connect statutory services with community-led and lived-experience networks to strengthen preventative support. Carers’ voices must be central to social work practice, service design, commissioning, and policy reform. Addressing structural barriers and valuing experiential knowledge is essential to building sustainable mental health systems. Although based in England, the mechanisms identified resonate internationally.

Romani (British) Gypsy, Roma, and Irish Traveller children remain significantly overrepresented in England’s child welfare system. This perspective paper extends the work of Allen and Hamnett (2022) by analysing publicly available data from the Department for Education (DfE) between 2010 and 2024 to assess disproportionality in the number of children looked after by the state. Using disparity ratios, our analysis reveals that both ‘Gypsy/Roma’ and ‘Traveller of Irish Heritage’ children continue to enter care at more than twice the rate of children from all other ethnic groups. We argue that this overrepresentation reflects not only differential patterns of need but also deeper systemic racism, cultural misunderstanding, and the conflation of distinct ethnic categories in data reporting. The inconsistent classification of ethnicity by the DfE and other government departments obscures the lived experiences of these communities and undermines efforts to develop proportionate and equitable child welfare responses. Our findings point to an urgent need for reform in how ethnicity data is collected and used in child welfare.

This paper begins by defining beauty and sublimity within social work, establishing the significance of aesthetics as encompassing both dimensions. It distinguishes between beauty—characterised by pleasantness and charm—and sublimity, marked by awe-inspiring and terrifying qualities. Two detailed practice vignettes—an adult daughter caring for a chronically ill parent and a young person experiencing philosophical loneliness—illustrate how Kantian aesthetics illuminate what clients encounter when facing situations that cannot be solved but must be lived with. The paper distinguishes between aesthetic reflexivity and problem-focused intervention, arguing that both matter but that traditional frameworks often overlook sublimity—the moral and existential complexity central to professional artistry. The paper’s principal contribution concerns aesthetic reflexivity in social workers, demonstrating that social work constitutes an art requiring sensibility and aesthetic connection with the clients. It argues that Kant’s aesthetic theory provides philosophical grounding for understanding aesthetics in social work practice. Finally, the paper addresses challenges to Kantian moral philosophy whilst demonstrating how his aesthetic theory offers a contemporary philosophical foundation for practitioners, scholars and educators, bridging professional artistry and the empirical world.

Approved Mental Health Professionals (AMHP) are often required to assess people experiencing suicidal thinking and they must make difficult decisions in challenging circumstances that require a range of factors to be considered, not least the safety of the person being assessed. This study explores some of the inherent challenges involved in this work and considers the preparedness of AMHPs, the complex dynamics that inform decision making and finally how AMHPs are supported by the organisations for whom they work. The research is an empirical study based on unstructured interviews with practitioners working in the field. It identifies that AMHPs can often believe the person being assessed is not mentally unwell, rather they are experiencing what the study describes as ‘emotional distress’ relating to stressful life events. The study also identifies evidence that AMHPs feel confident to fulfil their statutory role and reach independent decisions, however, despite some very good support structures, AMHPs would benefit from more enhanced support following cases where an undesired outcome occurs. The findings hope to assist social work training organisations and employers by highlighting the importance of training related to this area of practice and the necessity of robust support systems for practitioners.

Listening to the voices of the people who use adult social care is critical for service improvement and development. There are both proactive and passive ways of achieving this. While proactive methods such as co-produced service design and satisfaction surveys are well-researched, there is limited evidence on the impact that passive mechanisms, such as feedback from compliments and complaints, have on improving adult care services within local authorities. This study examined the effectiveness of learning from compliments and complaints in adult social care. A survey and two focus groups were conducted with adult social care practitioners within a single local authority, focusing on whether feedback supports individual or organisational growth from practitioners’ perspectives. The research found that compliments and complaints are valuable development tools but need to be supported by reflective and quality-assured organisational cultures. While complaints offer valuable learning opportunities, it was the morale-boosting effect of compliments that was highlighted by practitioners, suggesting that sharing positive feedback can enhance workplace culture, support recruitment and improve staff retention. The study also highlighted the need for local authorities to better understand the demographics of those providing and receiving feedback to address the needs of marginalised groups and promote inclusive service improvement.

ABSTRACT This article uses the metaphor of a shared artist’s palette to re-envision how trauma in nursing education can be understood through philosophy, art, and phenomenological inquiry. Rather than treating trauma as a discrete or static event, it is approached as a dynamic, layered, and relational experience shaped by emotional, ethical, and pedagogical forces within both educational and clinical environments. Drawing on Husserl’s theory of wholes and parts, narrative ethics, and post-positivist critique, the article proposes a reflective framework that enables educators and researchers to engage more sensitively with the complexity of nurses’ lived experiences. Arts-based methods, such as poetry, visual metaphor, embodied writing, and storytelling, are presented as essential practices for reconnecting with the affective, intuitive, and often marginalised dimensions of trauma that dominant positivist paradigms tend to overlook or silence. Through integrating philosophical reasoning with creative expression, the article encourages a more inclusive, compassionate, and ethically responsive orientation to the conditions that shape trauma in nursing practice. The palette metaphor emphasises how philosophical, emotional, and artistic elements mix and interact, creating a methodological approach that is both rigorously reflective and emotionally honest. Readers are invited to add their own colours, textures, and techniques to this palette, fostering a richer, more relational, and deeply humane understanding of the nuanced nature of trauma within the nursing profession.

Vulnerable children constitute a central focus of child protection efforts. At the individual level, they are exposed to diverse forms of adversity and vulnerability. At the interpersonal level, they face fragmented direct protective networks stemming from both family and school contexts. At the environmental level, multiple systemic and structural inadequacies hinder effective child protection, including legal and policy dilemmas, community-level challenges, and the limitations of social force. In response, this study proposes a social work intervention approach grounded in the active empowerment of individuals and the enhancement of external support mechanisms. The recommended multi-level interventions include: fostering vulnerable children’s innate capacity for self-protection at the individual level; establishing a support network from family and school at the interpersonal level; and strengthening a supportive ecosystem for child protection at the environmental level. Collectively, these interventions provide a practical framework for improving the protection and well-being of vulnerable children.

ABSTRACT A common requirement for teachers in the United States is writing an educational philosophy statement in which they articulate their beliefs regarding the purpose of education, conceptions about teaching and learning, and plans for the implementation of their philosophy. I posit that the enormous potential of this assignment for supporting preservice teacher development is being squandered. Students generally write undeveloped formulaic statements that mimic the beliefs of theorists and/or their teacher educators, rather than a true articulation of their beliefs and plans for their future classrooms. As one way of shifting this paradigm, I offer a scaffolded five-stage, semester-long process featuring instructor-designed resources, peer review, instructor feedback, and embedded opportunities for reflection. The model is practical and highly adaptable for a range of disciplines because it stems from well-established interdisciplinary approaches and methods for best practices in education. Specifically, it is grounded in the principles of Writing Across the Curriculum and the ungrading movement - approaches that are well aligned with each other and other active, learner-centred teaching methods. My project is grounded in the constructivist and critical theories and pedagogies of Dewey, Freire and hooks which serve as the foundation for the empowerment and liberation of students through deep and engaging work.