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This paper presents parents' experiences of community support and their recommendations for how their communities, and the services within them, might support their families. Generated through a human‐centred design methodology and using a desire‐centred framework, the findings suggest that parents receiving a family service require support invoking feelings of intimacy, trust, reciprocity, inclusivity, connection and belonging. Parents' recommendations for community support include addressing material and attitudinal constraints impacting on engagement with services; creating non‐judgmental services tailored to their needs but accessed as a last resort; and creating peer‐based opportunities to support each other. Parents reflect that moving beyond basic survival of risk and vulnerability to a position where thriving is possible requires purposeful integration of parent's existing and desired community into service interventions. Facilitating deliberate change at the intersection of community and service support is pertinent to current and future social work policy and practice. Wider opportunities for understanding and enabling the needs and aspirations of parents, which are often overlooked because of a focus on addressing risk and vulnerability, are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Common Assessment Framework provides a model of early intervention, which is familiar in local authorities throughout England, and asserts a participatory framework of child and family engagement. This paper is based on a qualitative study of parents and children who were subject to a multi‐agency process of early intervention in children's social care in a local authority in the Midlands of England. I advance the concept of assemblage to consider the basis of an active service user participation as rather more a struggle to achieve than something that has been granted by practitioner agencies. Interview extracts are used to show the enrolment and assembly of participation as a process of service users developing their active human agency in a multi‐agency setting. The article explores the assembling of skills in administration and management of meetings and plans, accessing knowledge and expertise through service user networks, and challenging professional expertise and institutional space while developing personal qualities of confidence and voice as a means of marshalling an effective participation in a multi‐agency setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The Frontline programme is a social work qualifying route, in England, featuring a different approach to curriculum design and delivery. Students are based in groups of 4, learning through practicing social work in a statutory child and family social work setting, alongside a Consultant Social Worker (in the role of practice educator). They are also supported by an Academic Tutor who works in partnership with the Consultant Social Worker to facilitate learning. A weekly “unit meeting” is a foundational aspect of the programme, providing opportunities for in‐depth discussion, teaching, and reflection on practice with families. The authors worked together over the first 2 cohorts of the programme and undertook action research to explore the learning opportunities that arise when academic staff and practitioners work side by side to support student learning in this model. Three broad themes were identified which were considered to be significant in helping students to learn which are explored in the paper: Learning through engaging in joint dialogue about practice in a unit meeting The influence of relationships on learning in social work The importance of a connected model of learning which has practice with children and families at its heart [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little research has been done into what social workers do in everyday child protection practice. This paper outlines the broad findings from an ethnographic study of face‐to‐face encounters between social workers, children and families, especially on home visits. The social work practice was found to be deeply investigative. Children's bedrooms were routinely inspected and were the most common place where they were seen alone. A high proportion of children were not seen on their own because they were too young and the majority of the time was spent working with parents and children together. Small amounts of time were spent with children on their own and some first encounters were so rushed that social workers did not even introduce themselves to the child. This arose from two key factors: firstly, organisational pressures from high workloads and the short timescales that social workers were expected to adhere to by managers and Government; secondly, practitioners had varying levels of communication skills, playfulness and comfort with getting close to children and skills at family work. Where these skills and relational capacities were present, social workers were found to have developed deep and meaningful relationships with some children and families, for whom it was apparent that therapeutic change had occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vague programme descriptions are known to impede implementation and evaluation. Yet social work change programmes often fail to describe in detail how they aim to provide better outcomes for children and families. This study focused on the Systemic Practice Model (SPM), which is a Finnish adaptation of Reclaiming Social Work, a practice model developed in England. The SPM aims to deliver systemic practice in children's social care and has recently been widely disseminated across Finland. However, research has found both considerable variation in its delivery and a lack of clarity about what it is. This study, applying realist evaluation, aimed to formulate a programme theory based on the perceptions of key informants (n = 12) involved in the national development and dissemination of the SPM during the period 2017–2019. The analysis yielded three core components (a systemic team, systemic weekly meetings, and systemic practice) and two context‐mechanism‐outcome (CMO) configurations, which represent causal chains of the SPM. The findings should enable its quality implementation and meaningful outcome and process evaluation. The findings will also aid organizations and practitioners both to identify changes required in their service provision and prevent adverse effects. This programme theory should be tested and refined with empirical data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article elucidates the challenges parents face when they lose the care of their children and their experiences of family counselling as a support service in Norway. A qualitative study following five mothers and one father whose children were in care was conducted through two focus groups and six individual interviews. The study found that the parents struggled to understand why their children had been placed in care and felt disempowered by the Child Protection Services (CPS). This situation led to complicated relationships with the CPS. We drew upon positioning theory and Goffman's theories about stigma and identity in this study, and these theories are explicitly used in discussing our analytic results. The study reveals the challenges encountered by CPS due to their dual role: On the one hand, they remove the children, and on the other, they offer support. The parents in this study also received assistance from the Family Counselling Services. Important results of this study are the parents' experiences of the two systems and, in particular, the different positions the systems seemed to place them in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to explore knowledge use and learning among social workers in everyday child investigation work. Research was undertaken in two Swedish children's services departments. The study applied an ethnographic approach. Methods for data collection included interviews, participant observations, reflective dialogues and a documentary analysis of case files. The social workers' knowledge sources were classified into research‐based, practice‐based and ordinary knowledge. The findings show that the social workers preferred practice‐based knowledge, which was primarily conveyed from colleagues and previous experience, and rarely consulted knowledge from sources found outside the practice setting. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the integration of knowledge was made possible through the social workers' engagement in both a verbal and a more cognitive (tacit) reasoning activity, processes that fostered learning at work. The social workers' learning was predominantly adaptive as they learned to handle tasks in a fairly routinized way on the basis of rules or procedures. The findings lend support to the notion that the use of different knowledge forms could potentially trigger learning in everyday social work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]