social work approaches

This briefing focuses on other therapies or measures to help children and young people who deliberately self-harm (DSH). The aim of the therapy is either to reduce the amount they self harm or to stop them self-harming completely. The population covered by this briefing are children and adolescents up to the age of 19 who live in the community. The characteristics of self-harm, and the psychological and psychosocial factors associated with self-harm among children and adolescents are covered in a previous briefing in this series.

This learning object is suitable for use in conjunction case studies once students have appreciated the basic framework of the legal rules. These materials raise awareness of: the complexity of the relationship between law and social work in practice; the breadth of legal knowledge necessary for effective practice; the fact that law cannot be seen in isolation from values, and must be subject to critical analysis; how different options for practice balance legal rules, moral rules and individual and collective rights.

This briefing provides an overview of what personalisation means for commissioners of social care services. It highlights the main tasks for commissioners delivering personalisation as ensuring the right balance of investment and shaping the market. It also looks at necessary changes to contracting and procurement models, with a shift towards outcomes-focused and person-centred approaches. Two practice examples are included.

The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) wants to bring together a lot of knowledge about social care, so that information on what works best is available to everyone. This Position paper is about how social care services can be made better by the people who use them - that is, the service users themselves. It brings together the main findings from six reviews that looked at whether service user participation made a difference to changing and improving social care services.

Report of the recommendations made by the 21st Century Social Work Review Group for the future of social services in Scotland. Published by the Scottish Government in February 2006, it set out a new direction for social work services in Scotland based on the strong core values of inclusiveness and meeting the whole needs of individuals and families. It seeks to equip social work services to rise to the challenge of supporting and protecting our most vulnerable people and communities in the early part of the 21st century.

This At a glance summary presents a new ‘systems’ model for serious case reviews. The model provides a method for getting to the bottom of professional practice and exploring why actions or decisions that later turned out to be mistaken, or to have led to an unwanted outcome, seemed to those involved, to be the sensible thing to do at the time. The answers can generate new ideas about how to improve practice and so help keep children safe.

This resource is one of a set of exercises and activities taken from the book 'Modern Social Work Practice' written by Mark Doel and Steven Shardlow. This activity is designed to trigger a consideration of what is different about, and what is common to, the various manifestations of social work. In this chapter, students are encouraged to look for the 'core' of social work practice.

Scottish Government publication aimed at preventing offending by young people. It outlines a shared ambition of what the government and its partners want to do to as national and local agencies to prevent, divert, manage and change offending behaviour by children and young people - and how they want to do it.

The framework is broad in its scope, spanning prevention, diversion, intervention and risk management, with reference to the individual, the family and the wider community. It reaches from pre-birth and early years to the transition to adult services.

Evidence-based policy and practice increasingly demands the use of research as a key tool to improve practice. However, little research can be directly applied to practice, many practitioners aren't equipped to digest research and appropriate support systems are lacking. What is needed is a better understanding of the relationship between social care research and the work of social care practitioners, including what organisational structures are needed to enable the use of research.