Retrenchment and restructuring: family support and children's services reform under the coalition

Child Protection and Family Support. These are two aspects of our work in family and children's services that have been much discussed over recent years. Can you protect a child whilst at the same time purport to support the family? Should the two functions be organisationally and structurally separated? Are they really just parts of the continuum of care and commitment which we all share in families and children? These and other similar questions have been frequently repeated during the first half of the 80's as we all searched for ways to meet the obvious deficiencies in the networks of families and children's services that had been established. But as we look to the remainder of the 80's there a number of critical issues which are well indentified but which we have yet to really come to grips with.

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Outputs Reviewed: Neo-Liberalism

North East Third Sector Research Group Annual Digest ◽

10.19164/netsrg.v0i0.453 ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 22

Author(s):

North East Third Sector Research Group

Keyword(s):

Social Policy ◽

Family Support ◽

Community Organizations ◽

Voluntary Organizations ◽

Welfare To Work ◽

Children's Services ◽

Big Society ◽

South Korean ◽

Children’S Services ◽

Society Project

Churchill, H. (2013). Retrenchment and restructuring: family support and children's services reform under the coalition. Journal of Children's Services, 8()3, 209-222Jackson Rodger, J. (2013). “New capitalism”, colonisation and the neo-philanthropic turn in social policy: Applying Luhmann's systems theory to the Big Society project. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 33(11/12), 725-741.Kim, S. (2013). Voluntary Organizations as New Street-level Bureaucrats: Frontline Struggles of Community Organizations against Bureaucratization in a South Korean Welfare-to-Work Partnership. Social Policy & Administration, 47(5), 565-585.

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Assessing the impact and implications for social workers of an innovative children’s services programme aimed to support workforce reform and integrated working

Social Work and Social Sciences Review ◽

10.1921/swssr.v16i3.538 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 16 (3) ◽

pp. 81-90

Author(s):

Nigel Malin ◽

Jane Tunmore

Keyword(s):

Social Workers ◽

Family Support ◽

Residential Care ◽

Best Practice ◽

Child Poverty ◽

Practical Implementation ◽

Children's Services ◽

North East ◽

Children’S Services ◽

The Impact

This article reports findings from an independent audit and evaluation of an innovative children's services programme (CSP) funded 2009-2011 by twelve Local Authorities under the auspices of the North-East of England's Improvement & Efficiency Partnership (NEIEP) to manage improvements and efficiencies across the children's services sector focusing upon messages for social workers. The overall purpose of the CSP was to make demonstrable progress in tackling the challenges of child poverty by delivering high quality support to the growing number of children with social care/health needs through regional improvement. The key objectives of the CSP included supporting workforce reform and integrated working; development of personalised services; family support to reduce the need for residential care; and provision of tools to aid commissioners with needs analysis. The audit identified key outputs, for example, improvements to best practice on Whole Family approaches, safeguarding and leadership training evolved through a skills framework; and included a regional model of social work supervision training along with a provision of options to increase the range and quality of foster care placements. The evaluation considered actions arising from the above findings, including demonstrated improvements to inter-disciplinary working and pooling resources to produce better outcomes for families; setting up a data-base to improve the balance between fostering, residential care and family support; and creating opportunities for social workers to explore the practical implementation of using personal budgets.

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