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Background to this project
The development of this learning object has grown out of a project which ATD Fourth World ran in 2005. This project centred around families living in poverty who have experienced social work services (ATD, 2005). The full report of this project is available on the ATD Fourth World web site at:
http://www.atd-uk.org/ukprogrammes/ATD_RightTrainers.pdf
The family members from ATD Fourth World:
A key element of these learning resources are the accounts of the families who are experiencing or have experienced poverty. These same families were involved in both the original 'Getting the Right Trainers' project and this one, which has ensured consistency across both projects and allowed the authors to forge a relationship of trust between the families and the development team. In addition to being filmed, these family members were involved in reviewing all the resources and advising on the appropriateness and authenticity of content.
The three authors of this learning object all participated in both projects. They also worked with the same ATD Fourth World families across both of these projects.
The three authors are:
James Blewett is a registered social worker who is Research Director and national chair for Making Research Count, the research dissemination network which in London is based at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit, Kings College London. After many years working in different posts of children's services James has taught extensively on social work qualifying and post qualifying programmes. As part of this work he helped developed a module with service users on the impact of poverty and parenting. James has written and researched around number of areas in children's social care including family support, child welfare policy and workforce issues.
Anna Gupta is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the Director of Post-Qualifying Studies in the Department of Health and Social Care. She was been the director of the successful London Post Qualifying Child Care Award at Royal Holloway for seven years and has developed the new Graduate Diploma in Work with Children and Families under the new GSCC Post Qualifying Framework. She is a qualified social worker with extensive experience of child care social work and management, including work as a children's guardian and expert witness in public law family court proceedings. She has published work on various aspects of child welfare, including on working with families living in poverty, childhood neglect and work with black and minority ethnic families. She is currently involved in an evaluation of family group conferences for black and minority ethnic families, and has recently completed a literature review on child protection systems and international adoption for the Children's High Level Group, a charity working with countries in Eastern Europe to develop their child welfare services.
Jane Tunstill is Visiting Professor and Children's Services Consultant at the Social Care Workforce Research Unit, Kings College, London and Emeritus Professor of Social Work, Royal Holloway, London University, where she established the Department of Health and Social Care and was responsible for professional and post qualifying social work education. Much of her research has been in family support and early intervention, and she has undertaken a large number of studies in both the statutory and voluntary sectors. Between 2000 and 2007 she was a Primary Investigator, (Director of the Implementation Module) of the DfES commissioned National Evaluation of Sure Start, responsible for the collection of national data on the roll out, service delivery and workforce issues. Her most recent NESS study is on the Safeguarding Activity of Sure Start Local Programmes and Children's Centres. Her published research studies include three consecutive Department of Health funded national studies, two on the implementation of the 1989 Children Act and one, a national study of the co-ordinating and networking activity of Family Centres, part of the Department of Health Parenting Initiative. She has undertaken a wide variety of commissions for the voluntary child care sector, including a mapping exercise of Family Support Services for FPI (Family and Parenting Institute); and a Cross Sector Scoping Study of the Family Support Workforce for CWDC (Children's Workforce Development Council).
In addition to undertaking research she is very committed to the need for imaginative and proactive dissemination of the knowledge base for children's services. She is member of the editorial board of Children and Society, and along with colleagues, was a founder member of the national social care dissemination project, Making Research Count, which now operates across England with a membership of approximately 250 health and social care agencies. She is a member of the Management Board of CAFCASS, in which role she has corporate sponsorship for research.
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The Children Act 1989 requires local authorities to provide services to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in need living in their area.
Practitioners who work with children and their families are therefore often required to undertake assessments in order to understand how services can offer support, in the context of safeguarding and/or promoting welfare.
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Historically there has been concern about the standard of assessments. To assist practitioners to improve the consistency and quality of these assessments the Government introduced the Assessment of children in need and their families (DH, 2000).
This framework takes into account the child's developmental needs, family and environmental factors and the parents' parenting capacity and how these affect the child's welfare.
The Sue's Story section of this learning object will take you through the different sections of the framework in some detail.
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More recently they have also introduced the Common Assessment Framework (DfES, 2005) for children who would not be defined as "in need" but have additional needs that cannot be met by one agency.
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Both models are built on an ecological approach. That is they assess parents' capacity to meet their children's developmental needs in the context of environmental factors such as the economic and social circumstances of families.
In this learning object you will be introduced to this ecological approach and be able to explore it in relation to a case study.
- Start page
- Introduction