A team of social workers engaged in child protection work forms a clearly bounded case and my intention was to gain access to such a case. More specifically I wanted to gain access to a social work team employed by a local authority as these teams are legally required both to support children deemed as in need and to investigate situations where children might be at risk. Through the use of delegated statutory powers these teams, uniquely, can make investigations, draw up child protection plans in conjunction with other professionals and make applications for legal orders through the courts according to the 1989 Children Act and the “Working Together” guidance (Dept for Education, 2013). These teams are seen as the “front line” in child protection work and often have to make the most difficult decisions about the most difficult cases. To provide a contrast I planned also to gain access to a different kind of social work team – one that works with cases referred by local authority teams for more in- depth assessment and support. These teams, typically employed by voluntary or charitable organisations but usually funded by the local authorities, are able to work in a more planned way with cases deemed suitable for the kind of service they offer.
As I have argued choice of case will have considerable consequences for the potential generalisability of the data and I wanted to ensure that the cases studied would have features that were not unusual for child protective social work.
Both cases were geographically located in Banksfield Metropolitan Borough Council. Banksfield is a former coal mining town in the north of England. About 82,000 people live in
Literature review identifies key themes in literature on the selected problem and enables the formulation of an overall research question
The research question is broken down into smaller sub-questions which address the constructs or concepts that make up the overall research question
Sub questions operationalised into methods: in this case into interview topics and potential themes for participant observations. Yin recommends use of multiple methods to capture the complexity of the case
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Banksfield itself and a further 150,000 in smaller communities in the borough. It is, on 2012 figures, the 47th most deprived local authority in Britain out of 326. In recent years the non- White population of the borough has increased to about 4% of the total. By comparison about 9% of the UK population is non-White and about 15% of the population of the county, Northshire, in which Banksfield lies (Ofsted, 2012)
Dept of Education statistics for 2012 (Dept for Education, 2012) show that the numbers of children per 10,000 classified as In Need (according to s17 1989 Children Act) or subject to a Child Protection Plan in England were as set out below. It can be seen from these figures that levels of need and risk of significant harm experienced by children in Banksfield are about or below average for England and below average for Northshire which has some urban centres with very high levels. This suggests that the client group the social workers were dealing with was not markedly unrepresentative of social work caseloads in England & Wales thus adding to potential generalisability.
Children in Need in England (rate per 10,000)
National Northshire Banksfield
325 352 255
Children in England subject to a Child Protection Plan (per 10,000)
National Northshire Banksfield
38 42 38
Table 4 Rates of children in need and children subject to a Child Protection Plan 2012
(Source: Dept for Education, 2012)
(these are approximate figures as children move in and out of need and on and off Child Protection Plans so populations are not constant)
Within children’s services there were two locality-based duty &assessment teams which held cases from initial referral for a period of assessment and four children-in-need teams which took on cases which had been assessed as requiring longer term intervention. I was able to negotiate access to one of the assessment teams which was located on one floor of a Health Centre in the village of Moorhouse about 4 miles from Banksfield. Moorhouse is a former mining community of about 12,000 people located in a semi-rural location surrounded by green land largely reclaimed from disused coal mines. The assessment team shared a large open-plan office with two children-in-need teams, a team of admin workers and a team of
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Health Visitors from the local Health Authority. These teams did not just cover Moorhouse but the whole eastern half of the metropolitan borough.
The team consisted of 1 team manager, 2 senior social workers who also acted as deputy team managers, 8 social workers and 1 social work assistant who did not have a social work qualification. The team manager left shortly after I began my study and the new manager arrived towards the end of the study. I interviewed both of them and all the other workers apart from one social worker who did not make herself available. I also interviewed the senior manager who managed this team. In addition I observed 6 duty/intake sessions, sitting with the social worker who was “on duty”, that is, tasked with dealing with new referrals as they came in, and a number of team meetings and 1 supervision. The duty observations took place in the team room so I was able to observe informal team talk and activity as well as the duty work. In addition, during one of my observations a suspected child abuse case was referred and dealt with. I interviewed the workers involved in dealing with this case with a focus specifically on this incident and using an improvised interview schedule. A more detailed schedule of observations made is given below in section 5.6
Banksfield, like many local authorities, funds a variety of charitable and voluntary organisations and I negotiated access to a Family Project, run by a national charity, located on the outskirts of Banksfield. This Project ran a variety of services but the one I gained access to had 3 social workers, one of them the team manager, who assessed and worked with families referred by Banksfield children’s services. This was a much smaller project and during the course of my study it lost its funding and was forced to close. This meant that I was unable to directly compare the two cases. However I had by this time interviewed all 3 social workers and observed some of their meetings and one supervision. I interviewed one of them twice as I observed her being supervised after one interview and asked if I could interview her again to discuss the material that had come up in the supervision. At the time of the study, and subsequently during thematic analysis of the data, it became clear that many of the preoccupations, perceptions and experiences of these social workers addressed very similar themes to those of the Moorhouse team and I felt justified in using this data alongside the Moorhouse data. As suggested earlier, a key aspect of qualitative designs is flexibility so that the real-life contexts being studied can be followed in all their complexity.
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