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Given that the number of children and young people needing care keeps rising and fewer people are becoming foster carers, efforts to support carers and workers in foster caring are essential. This paper considers the experiences of carers and foster care agency workers involved in Australia's piloting of the Mockingbird Family. With a view understanding experience, data were collected via focus groups with carers and agency workers (n = 20) involved in piloting, implementation and evaluation. Deductive analysis applied the theory of experience to generate understanding of experience, as both intrinsic and extrinsic dimensions to capture strengths in the Mockingbird Family's foster caring networks. These dimensions of experience included collective passions of carers and workers; experiential change over time; collective experiences as a moving force; and experiences as transformational. Understanding of experience associated with the perceived strengths of the Mockingbird Family, including strategies to promote strong professional relationships between carers and workers, is an important element in strengthening environments of children and young people in care. Safe and stable environments are crucial for wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an empirical study of child protection services in a local authority where rates of investigations and interventions rose to unprecedented levels during the course of a single year. The aim of the research was to explore explanations for this rise in demand among the providers of children's social care in the area. Using an interpretative qualitative design, a series of focus groups and interviews were carried out with practitioners and managers (n = 25) from statutory services and Early Help. The findings identified a combination of long‐term and short‐term drivers of demand. Long‐term factors emphasized the impact of rising levels of deprivation combined with cuts to community‐based services for children and young people. Short‐term factors ranged from a more proactive approach to child neglect to more effective multi‐agency partnerships and joint decision making. The interaction between these factors was found to be accentuating an underlying shift to "late intervention" across the sector. The findings are contextualized in relation to contemporary debates about the crisis of demand for children's social care and the complex relationship between prevention and protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how children experience social work interventions is an important part of gauging whether what is provided is genuinely helpful. In this paper, we describe the findings from a research project using Q‐method, aimed at understanding what children involved with statutory services think about their social workers and how they experience the time they spend together. Using a pre‐existing practice framework, we explored skills including empathy, collaboration, and purposefulness from the point of view of children and young people. The participants in our study (n = 22) were insightful observers of social work practice, able to describe not only how they experienced time spent with their workers but also inferring differences in motivation and approach. In addition, workers who were described in similar terms by different young people were nevertheless experienced differently. This suggests not an archetypal "good social worker"—instead, there are skills that are good for specific children at specific times within the context of specific relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a qualitative study of child protection in the UK. The research involved children's practitioners from a range of agencies, including social care, education, health and youth offending, who were asked about working together on complex child protection cases. The aim was to explore how participants talked about complexity in these cases, in order to deconstruct influential perspectives on interprofessional working. Interview transcripts were analysed using critical discourse analysis, a qualitative method that examines patterns of language use in relation to social structures of power and control. The findings identified three overall perspectives: clinical, expert system and relation‐centred approaches, which practitioners combined in various ways. These perspectives have a bearing on how the ‘team around the child’ is conceptualized in discourse about child protection. The paper links these findings to the assumptions of predictability and control currently embedded in policy and practice guidance, and explores their implications for social workers and other children's practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people in statutory care and protection interact with social workers, who hold potential to provide a supportive adult role in their lives. Many however, run away at an early age and end up on the street trading sex for money or other favours. There is potential to improve outcomes for young people in care if the relationship between young people and their social workers is better addressed. This paper uses data from a qualitative study of 14 young people who traded sex and who had experienced interactions with social workers. A thematic analysis identified three themes: the rigidity of social work practice; contesting the family situation; and resisting the at-risk label. We argue that to have any impact on outcomes for young people in care, social workers need to prioritise relationship-building above the need to conform to organizational protocols and guidelines. Such guidelines assist the social worker in assessing whether family situations pose high risk for a young person, but the 'at-risk' label is contested by young people, which results in a lack of trust and a barrier to relationship building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores findings from an exploratory study on sibling relationships following adoption reunion in adulthood. The qualitative data was gathered through in‐depth interviews with 33 adopted adults who were reunited with their birth sibling(s) through an adoption agency in the Republic of Ireland. The findings throw light upon the development of the emotional, often complex, relationships which may emerge when siblings meet for the first time in adult life. Factors influential in facilitating or hindering these post‐reunion relationships are discussed. The important insights are then considered in the context of the wider international literature on adoption, search and reunion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]