Suchergebnisse

Aimed at social researchers, students and research commissioners, this book is about the application, implementation and publication of social research. It focuses on the tasks of making findings available and ensuring that applied social research makes a difference to people's lives

In the UK and internationally, reducing inequalities in health and education has become accepted across the political spectrum as an essential component of government policy [...]

AbstractHaving a secure, safe and affordable home is an essential element in the experience of a 'good enough' childhood. This is not available to a large and growing number of children and parents in the UK because of a structural housing crisis affecting the availability, quality, affordability and regulation of accommodation. There is a clear body of evidence which demonstrates the negative effects of poor housing and homelessness on children's health and development. A much smaller body of work implicates housing policies and conditions in child abuse and neglect, but there is a profound lack of good quality data or research about the role which housing and homelessness play in shaping demand for social care in the UK. This article reviews the available evidence, identifying limitations and gaps. Its aim is to open up policy and practice conversations about the increasing significance of housing and homelessness as a critical issue for children's social care in the UK whilst making the case for an urgent research agenda.

Abstract
This article presents findings from a quantitative study of the national data-sets for statutory children's social care services in England. The aim of the study was to examine how demand management varied in local authorities with differing levels of area deprivation. About 152 local authorities census returns and other statistical indicators covering the period 2014–2017 were combined into a single data-set. Statistical analysis was undertaken to explore trends over time and correlations between indicators that might indicate patterns in the way demand was managed. Findings showed that high levels of deprivation have continued to be strongly linked to high levels of activity and that local authorities have continued to increase their use of protective interventions relative to referrals. Evidence was found for three interconnected mechanisms, through which local authorities tended to manage demand for services: screening, rationing and workforce churn. The article describes these mechanisms and comments on their significance for the current crisis of demand in the sector.

AbstractChild welfare systems internationally exhibit very large inequalities in a variety of dimensions of practice, for example, in rates of child protection plans or registrations and out‐of‐home care. Previous research in the midlands region of England (Bywaters; Bywaters et al.) has detailed key aspects of the relationship between levels of neighbourhood deprivation and intervention rates. This paper reports further evidence from the study examining the intersection of deprivation with aspects of identity: gender, disability, ethnicity and age. Key findings include a decreasing gender gap and a decreasing proportion of children in need reported to be disabled as deprivation increases. The data challenge the perception that black children are more likely than white to be in out‐of‐home care, a finding that only holds if the much higher level of deprivation among black children is not taken into account. Similarly, after controlling for deprivation and age, Asian children were found to be up to six times less likely to be in out‐of‐home care. The study requires replication and extension in order that observed inequalities are tested and explained. Urgent ethical, research, policy and practice issues are raised about child welfare systems.

AbstractResearch internationally has identified large differences in rates of child safeguarding interventions, recently characterized as child welfare inequalities, markers of social inequalities in childhood with parallels to inequalities in health and education. This paper reports a Nuffield Foundation‐funded study to examine the role of deprivation in explaining differences in key children's services interventions between and within local authorities (LAs). The study involved an analysis of descriptive data on over 10% of children on child protection plans or in out‐of‐home care in 14 English LAs at 31 March 2012. The data demonstrate very large inequalities in rates of child welfare interventions within and between LAs, systematically related to levels of deprivation. There is evidence of a gradient in child welfare inequalities across the whole of society. There also appears to be an equivalent of the inverse care law for health: For any given level of deprivation in local neighbourhoods, LAs with lower overall levels of deprivation were intervening more often. The findings raise fundamental questions for research, policy and practice including whether the allocation of children's service resources sufficiently recognize the impact of deprivation on demand and how we judge whether a safeguarding system is effective at the population level.

In England, the dominant policy narrative recognises no association between spending on children's services and quality and a limited association between quality and deprivation. We combined 374 inspection outcomes between 2011 and 2019 with data on preventative and safeguarding expenditure and Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) scores. A multilevel logistic regression model predicting 'good' or 'outstanding' judgements suggests each £100 increase in preventative spending per child was associated with a 69 per cent increase (95 per cent CI: 27.5 per cent, 124 per cent) in the odds of a positive inspection. A one-decile increase in deprivation was associated with a 16 per cent (95 per cent CI: −25 per cent, −5.7 per cent) decrease. Safeguarding expenditure was not associated with outcomes. Deprived communities have worse access to good-quality children's services and government policies that have increased poverty and retrenched preventative services have likely exacerbated this inequality. Further, inattention to socioeconomic context in inspections raises concerns about their use in 'take over' policies.

AbstractThis paper reports on an empirical study of child protection services in a local authority where rates of investigations and interventions rose to unprecedented levels during the course of a single year. The aim of the research was to explore explanations for this rise in demand among the providers of children's social care in the area. Using an interpretative qualitative design, a series of focus groups and interviews were carried out with practitioners and managers (n = 25) from statutory services and Early Help. The findings identified a combination of long‐term and short‐term drivers of demand. Long‐term factors emphasized the impact of rising levels of deprivation combined with cuts to community‐based services for children and young people. Short‐term factors ranged from a more proactive approach to child neglect to more effective multi‐agency partnerships and joint decision making. The interaction between these factors was found to be accentuating an underlying shift to "late intervention" across the sector. The findings are contextualized in relation to contemporary debates about the crisis of demand for children's social care and the complex relationship between prevention and protection.

This article presents the findings of a quantitative intersectional analysis of child welfare interventions within small area ethnic populations in England. Recent research has highlighted that White British children, on average, have higher rates of intervention than children from other ethnic groups in poorer neighbourhoods and lower rates in more affluent neighbourhoods. This raises the question of whether structural associations between poverty and child welfare interventions apply equally to children from all backgrounds, or whether recent research into socioeconomic child welfare inequalities is largely capturing differences between ethnic groups. We investigate this question using multilevel negative binomial regression models predicting rates of children in need, children on child protection plans, and children in State care in ethnic group populations within geographical areas with average populations of 7200 children and adults. We find significant differences in ethnic group intervention rates, depending on levels of deprivation. Available data have significant limitations, but intersectional analysis identifies that a social gradient does not apply to, or is much smaller for, many ethnic populations and is strongest for White and Mixed Heritage populations. Socioeconomic inequalities in child protection are highly contingent on the ethnicity of the population, reflecting broader sociological literature related to race and class. This limits the generalisability of non-intersectional child welfare inequalities and introduces new avenues and imperatives for research seeking to better understand both ethnic and socioeconomic inequalities in children's social services. We consider that, beyond institutional racism, social work may need to grapple with complex forms of 'institutionalised intersectional injustice'.

This theoretical paper addresses fundamental questions raised by a four nation comparison of child welfare interventions in the UK, the Child Welfare Inequalities Project, which has highlighted differences between and within countries. The Project analysed administrative data to examine the relationship between deprivation and state intervention. This Project builds on research by Coventry University which established both a social gradient in child welfare interventions and an inverse intervention effect similar to the inverse health law (better health care in more affluent areas). These empirical findings raise, but do not fully answer, whether such inequalities in child welfare interventions should be addressed. In order to consider this complex question this article aims to explore theoretical ideas from other disciplines to provide important perspectives on such inequalities. These perspectives include ideas from political theory, psychology and moral philosophy. They suggest that child welfare should be: structured in a fairer way (based on Rawls' work on justice); that people think society is more equitable than it is and would prefer it to be more equally distributed (based on Norton and Ariely's work on attitudes to inequality); and that it is ethically irrational not to address this (based on Singer's work on moral distance).