Children's Social Services Research Articles

Communicating with children's social services and reporting systems

Communicating with children's social services and reporting systems

The outcome of new referrals made by paediatric emergency medicine department to children's social services and a survey of the feedback received afterwards

<h3>Aims</h3> An audit of new referrals made by a paediatric emergency medicine department to Children9s Social Services and a survey of their outcomes and the feedback received, based on Lord Laming9s 2009 recommendations. <h3>Methods</h3> From March to July 2009, 9792 children attended paediatric accident and emergency (PA&amp;E). Of them, 2.5% (245 cases) were discussed at a weekly multidisciplinary (MDT) meeting held within the PA&amp;E. 21% (51 cases) generated a new referral to children9s social service department (CSSD) and this included a review of emergency referrals. The majority of child protection referrals were to three inner-city CSSD9s. All cases of concern were referred via fax to the CSSD where the family resided. The referral fax highlighted the reasons for referral and the cause of concern. A feedback form was faxed with the initial referral. In October 2009, each CSSD, which received a referral from PA&amp;E between March 2009 and July 2009, were contacted using records from the MDT and asked: ▸ If an initial assessment had been completed. ▸ Whether the case referred was still open. <h3>Results</h3> <h3>Feedback</h3> Only one written form of feedback was received regarding a referral. <h3>Conclusion</h3> The standard set by Lord Laming9s 2009 report states all referrals to CSSD by other professionals should result in an initial assessment. The referring professional9s should also be directly engaged with the assessment and receive feedback.1 During the 19-week period, 27.5% of referrals did not have an initial assessment and the department only received one written form of feedback from CSSD9s. Our recommendations are: ▸ Dialogue with the three main CSSD9s, seeking education and a better understanding of referral thresholds and whether the information they receive from the initial referral is adequate. ▸ Adaptation of the referral system to include a graded system of concern. ▸ Development of a system to record all oral feedback given by CSSD9s to PA&amp;E. ▸ Feedback between PA&amp;E and CSSD9s via a password protected email system, with a monthly reminder set for all agencies involved to email feedback via pro-forma email. ▸ A re-audit in six/twelve month9s time.

Whither practice-near research in the modernization programme? Policy blunders in children's services

In this article, we lament the effects of practice-distant research and associated policy initiatives on contemporary children's services in England. In the last decade, as a result of high profile inquiries into non-accidental child deaths, statutory children's social care services in the UK have been subject to a wide-reaching ‘modernization’ programme. We studied decision-making in the high blame environment of local authority children's services. Our research sought to examine the relationship between performance management and the impact of anticipated blame within the decision-making practices of those providing, supervising and managing these services. We show that systems and technologies can be developed which both assist the users in their daily work and achieve desired organizational goals, but without an ethnographically informed, practice-near approach, unsafe work regimes and practices can ensue.

Poverty and Parenting: Transforming Early Education's Legacy in the 1960s

Head Start, the federal program that provides preschool education, health, and social services for children from poor families, is one of the United States' most popular government programs. Created in 1965, it has endured as a symbol of commitment to children, serving just fewer than one million children a year in neighborhood sites across the country. Most accounts of Head Start's history do not start much before 1964 when Sargent Shriver, charged with directing Lyndon Johnson's antipoverty campaign, decided to focus funds on young children. Neither Shriver nor most of those he consulted in planning the new program were particularly conscious of earlier efforts to combat poverty by educating young children. Nevertheless, the program they designed carried forward important aspects of turn-of-the-twentieth-century free kindergartens and day nurseries, as well as the nursery schools sponsored by the federal government in the 1930s.

Integrating children's services in England: national evaluation of children's trusts

Poor co-ordination of services can have severe consequences for disadvantaged children with complex needs. Since 2003 national and local governments in England embarked on sweeping reforms aimed at improving and integrating local health, education and social services for children. These were to be organized locally by children's trusts and piloted by 35 children's trust pathfinders. This study described and compared the experience of integrating children's services in all 35 children's trust pathfinders, covering 20% of children in England. It had a prospective mixed-methods design. Over 3 years we interviewed 147 managers and professionals working in the children's trusts, including 172 semi-structured interviews, carried out two questionnaire surveys of the 35 children's trusts and analysed official documents. In most areas different agencies jointly commissioned children's services, especially for mental health, disabilities and multi-purpose children's centres, and increasingly pooled finances. Provision of multi-agency and multi-professional services was increasing. Professionals generally supported these changes but found them stressful. All children's trusts appointed directors of children's services and established boards representing multiple agencies. Systems for sharing information about individual children were mostly in place but were still underused. Health services were generally less involved in joint work than were local authorities' education and social care services, with notable exceptions. Areas where local authorities and health authorities shared geographical boundaries made most progress. Some children's trusts made few changes beyond their statutory obligations. Children's trusts enabled major changes to services in areas where local actors and organizations were motivated and empowered. In other areas the remit of children's trusts was often too broad and vague to overcome entrenched organizational and professional divisions and interests. Policymakers need to balance facilitation of change in areas with dynamic change agents with methods for ensuring that dormant areas and agencies are not left behind.

The Role of an Intermediary Organization in Promoting Research in Schools of Social Work: The Case of the Bay Area Social Services Consortium

The multifaceted role of research in social work education and practice requires innovation to respond to the broader mission of the university and the needs of the community. Building research capacity and supporting infrastructure for research thus demands new approaches to effective collaboration between stakeholders. Intermediary organizations such as the Bay Area Social Services Consortium (BASSC) respond to the directive to bridge research and practice in social service delivery. This article presents BASSC as an example of a modern intermediary organization, discussing in turn the development of the training, policy, and research agendas and the challenges associated with implementing and maintaining the collaboration. The article concludes with a discussion of the unique contribution of intermediary organizations such as BASSC to supporting the multifaceted roles of research in schools of social work. KEY WORDS: evidence-informed practice; intermediary organizations; mediating structures; research capacity; schools of social work ********** Efforts to enhance the research capacity and infrastructure of schools of social work are linked to the research mission of the university as well as social work education and practice. Over the past decade there has been increased interest in connecting the evidence of service outcomes with the improvement or redefinition of practice. Evidence related to the design and outcomes of interventions seeks to validate existing interventions when appropriate, challenge and discourage ineffective interventions, and develop and test innovative approaches to service delivery. Public and private universities and colleges are increasingly under scrutiny for their ability to remain relevant in a changing social, economic, and political climate. Challenges to the ivory tower reputation of the university and growing financial pressures urge university administrators to promote different approaches to traditional research. Responding to the research mission of the university thus requires a greater emphasis on community partners and collaborations that stretch faculty members to use new strategies to respond to changing community needs. Social work research is often conducted in the interest of practice and yet a considerable divide exists between the research and practice communities. Agencies are increasingly at the mercy of funding sources and demands to demonstrate improved outcomes and yet capacity to measure progress varies from agency to agency. To complicate matters, the demands of daily practice do not lend themselves to addressing complex research questions that require immediate response. Certainly, the traditional research process does not proceed anywhere close to the fast pace of practice. In addition, dissemination and utilization of research that is most critical to practice often receives lower priority among researchers given the minimal rewards for work beyond peer-reviewed publications in the academic system (Shafer, 2006). Innovative approaches to effective collaboration are needed to ensure that social work research is relevant to practice. Alongside efforts to increase research infrastructure through federally funded institutes, effective partnerships with agencies enhance the research resources of schools of social work by diversifying funding sources and establishing relationships for shared research. Mediating structures, or intermediary organizations, can serve as models for facilitating collaborative relationships. Mediating structures or institutions can be viewed as platforms to bring together two or more sets of collaborators to address shared concerns to bridge the connections between research and practice as well as policy and Practice (Austin et al., 1999). Intermediary organizations have emerged in a variety of fields (for example, education; workforce development; and social services for children, youths, and families) to support individual and group empowerment and to avoid isolation so as to connect practice and policy (Wynn, 2000). …

Mental health and educational difficulties in children in contact with Children's Social Services

ABSTRACTThe British Child Mental Health Survey 1999 collected data from 10 438 children aged 5–15 years, selected at random from the child benefit register. At 2 and 3 years, all those with a psychiatric disorder and a random third without were followed up with further detailed interviews about the services contacted if parents reported service contact or if parents expressed concern about their child's mental health at baseline and follow‐up, but reported no service use. We compared children in contact with Children's Social Services with children in contact with Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) or no services. The children in contact with Children's Social Services had a high level of psychopathology and considerable educational difficulties. Despite this, they often had no contact with CAMHS or access to provision for special educational needs. It also became clear that parents were often using Children's Social Services as a first‐line service, i.e. a way of trying to access help. The results provide us with an interesting insight into the level of need of those children in contact with Children's Social Services and we hope to stimulate discussion about how liaison between all the services children access can better provide for their needs.

Developing an Electronic Social Care Record: a tale from the Tyne

This paper reports on the development process of an Electronic Social Care Record (ESCR), which used an adapted approach to Participatory Design (PD). PD is an established range of methodologies and principles for involving users in the design and implementation of systems or products. University researchers worked as part of a wider team including corporate social service stakeholders, a multidisciplinary children's social service team, and a technology provider, to develop a system that supports the integration of information of various teams/disciplines which need to work together to intervene with children who are in need. Using action research and ethnographic techniques, the researchers sought to understand and address the challenges faced by the various stakeholders when designing a system to deliver an ESCR.

Describing the needs of children presenting to children's services: issues of reliability and validity

Children's social services in England and Wales deal with a wide range of referrals of children who are or may be ‘in need’. Finding ways of describing the issues that present in such referrals is important if we wish to understand the nature of the work of children's services and explore different interventions and outcomes. Yet there have been few attempts to describe the full range of needs presenting to social services, and no studies of the reliability or validity of attempts to define the types of need. In this article the legal definitions of need, a typology developed by Sinclair et al, a related one used by the Department of Health and one developed within the current study were compared for reliability and construct validity. There were two main findings. First, it was found that while the presence of needs could generally be agreed on in all the schemes, ascriptions of a ‘main’ need were not made reliably. This is important because a ‘main’ need has been used in both research and statistical returns to government. Second, while existing schemes appeared well suited to describing allocated cases, they were less able to describe the range of needs presenting in all referrals to social services.

The Interpretation of Human Rights in English Social Work: An Exploration in the Context of Services for Children and for Parents with Learning Difficulties

Human rights are a central part of a social worker's value base in contemporary practice, but the structures by which social work services are delivered can adversely affect practitioners’ abilities to uphold service user rights. This article describes the organizational development of social work services in England and the evolution of a rights focus for the practice of social work. It uses two cases, participation by children and young people looked after by the local authority and parents with learning difficulties, to determine what prevents the delivery of rights at practice level. We argue that the structures which are the product of historical development prevent workers delivering a service that is anti-oppressive and grounded in a rights-based approach to practice. This suggests that the recent changed arrangements for the delivery of social work offer the opportunity to address human rights within practice and reinvigorate the profession. The division of the profession between children's trusts and adult social services within separate local authority departments or care trusts should make dialogue between specialist social workers, which has been suppressed by internal structures, possible. Such a dialogue could contribute to saving the profession from the disintegration that its division threatens, while advancing the human rights agenda.

Young people's views of children's rights and advocacy services: a case for ‘caring’ advocacy?

AbstractThis paper looks at some preliminary findings from research with young people in foster and residential care in the UK who have received advocacy services from a range of local authority and voluntary agencies. The study also includes the views of professionals, from both children's rights and social services. The initial findings highlight the importance to young people of their relationship with rights professionals. They speak about the value to them of care and respect, aspects not always seen as fundamental to rights work. Caring, in its various guises is seen by young people as a vital component of their relationship with children's rights workers. They also see this as important within advocacy work itself since caring about the outcome is often key. A pure individual rights focus with an emphasis on challenge and ‘being heard’ may not take account of the complexity of their situation and may pose difficult dilemmas for young people, especially in dealings with their carers.This ‘caring’ advocacy is not the paternalistic approach of a professional who ‘knows what's best for you’ but is a model based on a strong awareness of ways that young people are excluded and oppressed. It is also about placing a positive value on their contribution as citizens and links to a view of society that gives importance to an ethic of inter‐relationship and care as well as an ethic of individual rights. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Prevention in integrated children's services: the impact of sure start on referrals to social services and child protection registrations

AbstractEvery Child Matters, the English government's plans for integrated children's services, proposed that preventative approaches such as those developed through Sure Start should be able to reduce the numbers of children requiring more intensive support from children's social services and, by implication, the numbers of children on the child protection register. This study examined the impact of Sure Start local programmes (SSLPs) on four local authorities with social services responsibilities in the northeast of England. The researchers analysed routinely collected statistical data concerning over 10,000 referrals of children under four years and over 1,600 child protection registrations (CPRs) in an eight‐year period before and after the introduction of 19 SSLPs. They also analysed interviews with 36 key informants in eight case study SSLP areas. Contrary to expectations, the quantitative data revealed no discernable short‐term effect on the numbers of referrals, or on CPRs. Interview data showed broad agreement on the potential impact of preventative work undertaken by SSLPs and many respondents believed that it was too early to draw conclusions. Alternatively, the universal approach to prevention within the Sure Start areas and the attempts to provide non‐stigmatising and non‐intrusive community‐based services may be ineffective in reducing the need for intensive support for ‘at risk’ families. The findings are discussed in relation to ‘targeted’ prevention programmes and government policy intentions. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

Enfermagem e genética: uma crítica feminista rumo ao trabalho em equipes transdisciplinares

A informação genética e as tecnologias são cada vez mais importantes no cuidado em saúde, não somente nos países desenvolvidos, mas no mundo todo. Vários fatores globais prometem aumentar a futura demanda para pesquisa e serviços de saúde em genética moralmente conscientes. Embora os enfermeiros sejam o maior grupo profissional, prestando cuidado de saúde no mundo todo, eles não tomaram a liderança rumo a esse desafio. Insights, a partir da análise feminista, ajudam a esclarecer algumas das relações sociais e dos obstáculos culturais que têm impedido a integração da tecnologia genética na área da enfermagem. Um modelo alternativo é sugerido - o modelo transdisciplinar -, o qual foi desenvolvido inicialmente por uma enfermeira e introduzido, na década de 1970, na prestação do cuidado em saúde e no serviço social para crianças com déficit de desenvolvimento. Esse modelo holístico permite que todo profissional de saúde tenha a mesma voz ao determinar como o cuidado de saúde em genética será globalizado.

Predicting Functional Improvement over Time in a System of Care

Understanding the conditions under which children benefit most from systems of care approaches can help administrators allocate scarce resources, improve services, sustain existing systems, and implement new initiatives. The purpose of this study was to determine whether demographic characteristics, referral source, Medicaid status, presenting problems, or place of residence predicted improvement over time in a system of care. Results indicate that age at enrollment was the only variable that predicted functional improvement after 6 months of system of care involvement. Further research is needed that explores differences in effective service provision for younger and older children served in systems of care. These findings support the growing recognition that prevention and early intervention should be core aspects of children's social services.

What are children's trusts? Early findings from a national survey

The Children Act 2004 and National Service Framework for Children, Young People and Maternity Services require fuller integration of health, education and social services for children and young people in England and Wales. The UK government supported the establishment of 35 experimental children's trust pathfinders (henceforth called children's trusts) in England. A questionnaire was completed by managers in all 35 children's trusts a year after their start. Children's trust documents were examined. Census and performance indicators were compared between children's trust areas and the rest of England. Children's trust areas had demographic and social characteristics typical of England. All children's trusts aimed to improve health, education and social services by greater managerial and service integration. All had boards representing the three sectors; other agencies' representation varied. Two-thirds of children's trusts had moved towards pooling budgets in at least some service areas. At this stage in their development, some had prioritized joint procurement or provision of services, with formal managerial structures, while others favoured an informal strategic planning, co-ordination and information sharing approach. The commonest priorities for services development were for disabled children (16 children's trusts), followed by early intervention (11) and mental health services (8). The diverse strategies adopted by these 35 children's trusts during their first year is due to their own characteristics and to the way government strategy developed during this period. Whilst some prioritized organizational development, joint financing and commissioning, and information sharing, others laid more emphasis on mechanisms for bringing front-line professionals closer together. Their experiences are of value to others deciding how best to integrate children's services.

Impact of a System of Care on a Community's Children's Social Services System

Researchers and practitioners have questioned how the implementation of a system of care influences the broader context of children's social services within a community. We examined the impact that the Dawn Project system of care had on children's services in Marion County, Indiana. A series of semi-structured interviews were conducted in order to gain a broad understanding of stakeholder perspectives related to how system-level and other community leaders viewed system of care influences. Qualitative analyses uncovered several common themes including positive impact at the community level, challenges to implementation, and feelings of ambivalence related to program impact. Results were generally positive and suggested that most respondents saw core system of care principles beginning to emerge within the community related to the establishment of the care system. In addition, challenges to implementing the system of care also were uncovered, including some underlying resistance to system-level changes. Implications from our study highlight the importance of continuously working to enhance strengths and collaboration among systems, integrate and coordinate across systems and services, and authentically involve families at all levels.

New Labour and the Public Sector: A Tale of Two Green Papers

Public sector reform will be at the heart of Labour's third term of office. The changes under way or planned in children's services and adult social care services in England are prototypes of the pursuit of services that are person‐centred, seamless and proactive, with a focus on positive outcomes and well‐being. This article examines the similarities in approach between the two sets of changes, and warns that implementation will be a difficult task.

Is rehabilitation the cinderella of health, education and social services for children?

Is rehabilitation the cinderella of health, education and social services for children?

Head Start's National Reporting System: a work in progress.

Head Start is the nation's largest school-readiness program for young children considered at risk of poor academic outcomes. Since opening in 1965, the program has served >22 million children and their families. The majority of participants are 3- and 4-year-olds, and almost all live below the federal poverty level. Head Start delivers comprehensive services to meet the needs of the “whole child”: physical and mental health, preschool education, social and emotional growth opportunities, social services for children and families, and parental and community involvement. A research-and-evaluation component was part of the design of the program, making it a national laboratory for planning and testing a variety of early childhood services. Over the decades, thousands of studies on Head Start and other comprehensive programs have established that early intervention does boost school readiness, although investigations of long-term effects are relatively sparse. Certainly a major deterrent to productive evaluation is the range of Head Start's objectives and the historical lack of appropriate assessment tools. The problem was addressed most recently by the Head Start Program Performance Measures Initiative.1 Specific goals were identified in the areas of health, social and emotional development, cognition, and family involvement. Measures then were …

Social services provided for physically abused children in Sweden: background factors and interventions

This study aims at describing and analysing what kinds of social services are provided for physically abused children in Sweden. The social services files were examined for 113 children under 15 years of age (67 boys and 46 girls) who had been reported to the police as having been physically abused by a parent or equivalent caretaker in a particular police district. The children's social services files indicated an increased risk of a parental abusive behaviour prior to the abuse incident. There had been former interventions in 81 per cent of the families and previous reports on neglect or abuse in 44 per cent of the 113 families. After the abuse incident, investiga‐tions were opened in 80 per cent of the cases. The three most common interventions were placement in foster care, referrals to Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Service and Social Services support contacts. The study shows that there was a tendency towards more proactive work with injured children, children of immigrant parents and children of mentally ill parents.