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This paper presents the findings from a qualitative study that sought to understand the experiences of frontline staff working in Oxfordshire County Council (OCC) Children's Social Care Services and their views on a new family safeguarding model (Family Solutions Plus). Focus group interviews were conducted with 20 frontline staff and managers in different teams across OCC Children's Social Care Services using video conferencing software. Thematic analysis identified three overarching themes: Preparation for the implementation of Family Solutions Plus, staff views on the implemented model, and challenges to its implementation. Staff voiced strong support for the new model, which places a much greater emphasis than previous practice on supporting the whole family, developing parenting skills and keeping children safe with their families. The challenges associated with the transition to a new model were considerable in the short term, partly due to the COVID‐19 pandemic, but there was optimism that the new model could be sustained and stabilized over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the findings from a longitudinal study of vulnerable young people's transitions to adulthood, this paper explores the ideas of shame and recognition. The young people, aged between 12 and 17 years at the first interview, had experienced chronic exposure to adversity from an early age (abuse, violence, mental health issues, addictions, and expulsion from school). They were clients of statutory and non‐governmental services: child welfare, juvenile justice, remedial education, and mental health services. This paper draws on the qualitative phase of the study (n = 107); young people and a trusted other, nominated by the young person, participated in three annual qualitative interviews. Interviews focused on young people's experiences of services, key transitions, their relationships, and the strategies they used to locate support and resources. Experiences of shame, misrecognition, and seeking recognition emerged as dominant themes in the young people's accounts, and these are explored in this paper. The paper concludes with a discussion on responsive social work interventions that generate a deeper understanding of young people's experiences of shame and misrecognition. Central to this practice are critical and relational social work practices that actively support young people to achieve recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through adoption, the state actively contributes to creating families. It therefore also assumes the role of guarantor of the child's best interests in the adoption process, which entails assessing the suitability of presumptive adoptive parents. In the present paper, we use the concluding sections of assessment reports on applicants for intercountry adoption in Sweden to answer the following question: what must be said about an individual or a couple in order for her/them to be seen as a suitable adoptive parent? We thus assume that report conclusions serve to display parent suitability to their audiences. The assessment aligns with Swedish national adoption guidelines, and the study shows how the assessment handbook comes to serve as a catalogue of arguments that not only define good parenthood but also outline a way of life that is suitable for parenthood. The analysis illustrates how valid arguments for granting consent to adopt refer to three layers of suitability. They include not only the applicants' insights into and knowledge about adoption in particular and children in general but also their conventional and orderly life, i.e. a life free from distractions that could hinder a wholehearted focus on children and family life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the concepts underpinning the reasoning processes of social worker's decision‐making provides important insights into how social work practice is undertaken. This paper examines one of the major discourses used by social workers in decision reasoning in a non‐governmental organization child protection context in Aotearoa/New Zealand: family maintenance. This study found that family maintenance as a concept was strongly privileged by social workers. This resulted in attempts to preserve families and created a hierarchy of preferred decision outcomes. A preference for family maintenance was supported by legal, moral, psychological and Māori cultural concepts. This pattern of constructs underpinned the ‘weighing up of harms’ when considering removal, and generally reflected a child welfare orientation. In addition to this, it was found that ‘family’ was broadly defined, and could include people who had a relationship with the children, or Māori definitions of extended family, in addition to legal ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]