New Wine in Old Wineskins? the Adaptability of Child Welfare Services in the United Kingdom and Internationally to Developments in Policy and Research

Abstract:

The conundrum of how best to identify and provide services to children and young people who have experienced, or who are at risk of experiencing, child maltreatment, (a sub population of those children whose developmental outcomes are likely to be poor without the provision of supportive services), has been central to the development of universal child welfare services in the United Kingdom since the introduction of the ‘welfare state’ immediately after WWII. Limiting our observations to the post-Kempe era, we illustrate two ways of approaching this problem, one policy led, the other evidence driven.

The legislation and policy mandate in the UK directs services to both protect the most vulnerable children (those at risk of experience of maltreatment) alongside those whose health and development are likely to be compromised without the provision of ameliorative and preventative services. Public opprobrium of ‘worst cases’ and resourcing not congruent with need, have served to create a situation where there is often default to crisis management in social work practice. Yet emergent evidence as to the prevalence of childhood adversity and it’s long and pernicious reach in terms of potentially life-long effects have served to highlight the inadequacy of child welfare systems to systematically identify and address such needs.

This roundtable session will begin with the presenters offering a general comparative overview of child welfare systems in developed nations before providing a synopsis of their experiences of conducting two types of research in the UK, the first into the ways in which social workers interpret legal and policy mandates in practice and the second into how new scientific evidence in the field of child welfare may inform more accurate understandings with regard to the needs of children as well as providing challenges to child welfare providers. Core to this is the work of our Multiple Adverse Childhood Experiences research group. We will draw on the work undertaken by this group with respect to adolescent suicide and interpersonal violence as illustrative to the ways in which social work may benefit from the application of evidence to assessment and decision-making practices. We will further illustrate our work with examples drawn form our research in Europe, the Unite States and Australia. Our aim is stimulate an international debate as to the possibilities for advancement of interventions based on new knowledge, with particular interest in the issues of system adaptation, training of social workers and measurement of impact on child outcomes.