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There is recognition that teams act as a locus for the sensemaking activity that underpins social workers' judgement. Research has highlighted that teams also provide emotional support for practitioners. Although sensemaking involves emotional and social processes, there has been limited examination of how emotional support in teams interacts with sensemaking. This article uses the Team as Secure Base (TASB) model as a framework for presenting findings from an ethnographic study of four social work teams in England. Data comprise interviews with social workers and supervisors (n = 22) and fieldnotes from observations (n = 23). Teams exhibited behaviour consistent with the domains of TASB, creating a space for safe exploration of social workers' thoughts and feelings. However, while a strong sense of team membership contributed to participants' sense of safety and self-efficacy, this impacted on sensemaking in other ways, such as giving less weight to the views of those who were not team members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Social work teams can provide a secure base for social workers, supporting them to manage the emotional demands of child and family social work (Biggart et al., 2017). As the COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated increased remote working, social workers have needed to maximise their use of virtual networks and navigate new ways of connecting with colleagues. This study aims to examine the extent to which social work teams can function as a secure base in the context of remote working. Design/methodology/approach: Between 19th March and 13th June, the authors undertook 31 in-depth, qualitative interviews with child and family social workers across 9 local authorities in England. this research captured social workers' perspectives on remote working and team support throughout lockdown in England. Findings: In this study, the authors report findings in three key areas: how social workers experienced the sudden shift to increased remote working; how social work teams provided a secure base for remote working; and the challenges for sustaining the team as a secure base when working remotely. Originality/value: These findings will be of interest to social workers, managers and local authorities as they adapt to the challenges of increased remote working in child and family social work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on the uses of police-led restorative justice (RJ) for female offenders by one constabulary in England from 2007 to 2012. The study consisted of (1) quantitative analysis of administrative police data on 17,486 participants, including 2,586 female offenders, and (2) qualitative analysis of twelve narrative interviews with female offenders sampled from the database. Quantitative data demonstrated that the majority of female offenders committed low-level offences and that the majority of participants experienced street RJ. Female offenders reported mixed experiences with RJ in qualitative interviews. On the whole, women did not understand what RJ was, leading to complications as many felt their victims were mutually culpable. Some felt that the police forced them to apologise and treated them like criminals while others felt the police gave them a second chance. The study raises questions about what the police can bring to RJ in relation to vulnerable women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literature on work-family balance, role and boundary issues are commonly discussed in relation to parents who work outside of the home. Work and family are considered as two different spheres of activity, with different role identities and cultural meanings. For foster carers, however, in very significant ways, their family is their work and their work is their family - so roles are not so clearly separated and boundaries are not so clearly defined. This paper reviews theoretical approaches to the work-family interface and draws on qualitative data from 40 interviews with long-term foster carers. It provides an analysis of their accounts of their roles as professional carers and/or committed parents to explore how they manage different and potentially contradictory role identities. The study found that foster carers primarily identified as carers or as parents, but that some foster carers could move flexibly between these roles while others could not. For foster carers who could be flexible, the two roles enriched each other rather than causing stress and role conflict. Implications for supporting professional foster carers who can also meet the parenting needs of long-term foster children are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]