Children

The focus of this Insight is pre-birth child protection assessment and care planning, and more specifically, the lead social work role within this work.

This summary looks at the participation of children and young people in social care, including examples of recent frameworks. We drew on a wide range of evidence focusing on children and young people's participation, and included literature looking at specific contexts where challenges most commonly occur, such as in child protection, and with BAME and disabled youth. We found that while there was no shortage of resources on participation, there were still limitations around evaluations of the effectiveness of structures and procedures to enable children and young people to have their wishes taken into account.

This evidence summary examines how community-based interventions can support young people's social and emotional wellbeing. Due to a scarcity of robust evaluation and reporting taking place across the sector, we selected a wide-range of materials for this review, including systematic reviews, relevant individual studies and case studies from UK-based organisations. Studies examining a range of different children’s and young people’s interventions were selected, with most aimed at improving social skills, emotional wellbeing and behavioural difficulties.

This Outline explores the impact of parental substance misuse on children and identifies evidence around effective methods of intervention for social workers.

This Outline explores good practice approaches to investigating child sexual abuse that may minimise harm or distress to the child (and non-abusing parent). It draws on Serious Case Reviews, academic literature and online resources from key organisations, providing links to examples of good practice and brief outlines of relevant content within the sources. 

The value of participation by service users in shaping and improving practice and services is well recognised in much existing guidance and practice, but less so in relation to contact with families of children referred on child protection grounds.

Gary Clapton, Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Edinburgh spoke to Kerry Musselbrook from Iriss about what being a good father means to him, and tells us about the Iriss Insight (evidence summary) he wrote on good practice with fathers in children and fam

How we think about and understand fathering has changed. Active ‘fathering’ is now an accepted role for men at home and fathers are visible outside the school gates, in parks and playgrounds and in the streets and shopping centres. Fathers’ involvement in child care increased from less than 15 minutes a day in the mid-1970s to three hours a day during the week by the late 1990s, with more at the weekend. This trend of increasing involvement has continued…

Practitioners discuss research around offending in residential child care.

Conversation with Danielle Farrel about her PhD research which examined the 2012 child abuse scandals in the UK.