Collaborative Practice With Vulnerable Children and Their Families

The focus of the book is effective collaborative practice at the ‘tertiary’ level: that is, with children and their families and carers receiving a ‘targeted’ service because they are at risk of suffering significant harm, or needing out-of home placement. The evidence is clear that the wellbeing of parents and children across the age range who are experiencing complex difficulties will continue to deteriorate unless they receive high quality single-disciplinary but well-co-ordinated services from a range of professionals. A ‘team around the family’ approach is now recognised as essential for the effective provision of support, educative, therapy and placement services.

June Thoburn CBE, LittD is an Emeritus Professor of Social Work at the University of East Anglia. She qualified as a socialworker in 1963 and worked in local authority child and family social work and generic practice in England and Canada before taking up a joint appointment (with Norfolk County Council) at UEA in 1979. As a founding Director of the UEA Centre for Research on the Child and Family and of the Making Research Count collaboration, she has a particular interest in finding innovative ways of helping social workers to use knowledge from a range of sources in their practice. Her teaching and research have encompassed family support and child protection services for children and families in the community and services for children placed away from home, whether with family members, in foster care or with adoptive families. Throughout her career as a practitioner, educator and researcher she has been particularly interested in the development of partnership-based theories and practice approaches, whether this is partnership between professionals from different agencies and disciplines, or partnership with the children and adults who need their services. Related to this is her research on child welfare service provision for minority ethnic children and families. From her first book ‘Captive Clients’ through ‘Paternalism or Partnership: Family Involvement in the Child Protection Process’ and the ‘Your Shout’ report of the views of young people in care, she has been particularly concerned to explore the power dimension when clients/ patients are unable to consent or are reluctant recipients of services. Another key theme has been an exploration of differences and similarities in the ways in which professionals in different jurisdictions work together to provide family support and child protection services (explored in a Leverhulme Foundation funded study of children in out-of-home care in 28 jurisdictions and in her (2013) chapter on services for vulnerable and maltreated children’ in European Child Health Services and Systems (I. Wolfe & M. McKee, eds)). She is frequently asked to provide expert evidence (in the UK and abroad) in complex child welfare cases, and to undertake analyses of events leading to child deaths or serious injury. She has served as Vice Chair of the General Social Care Council, Chair of the Jersey Child Protection Committee, and a member of the Board of Cafcass. She is currently Chair of the Norfolk Family Justice Board, and a Trustee of Family Lives and Break Charity, and was recently appointed to the Academic Advisory Board of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

Julie Taylor PhD, FRCN, RN, MSc, BSc (Hons) is a nurse scientist specialising in child maltreatment. She is Professor of ChildProtection in the School of Health and Population Science at the University of Birmingham, with previous chairs at the Universities of Edinburgh (NSPCC Child Protection Research Centre) and Dundee (School of Nursing and Midwifery). For three years (2010-2013) she was Head of Strategy and Development (Abuse in High Risk Families) with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). Julie’s work is at the leading edge nationally and internationally in reframing child maltreatment as a public health concern. Her research programme is concentrated at the interface between health and social care and is largely underpinned by the discourse of cumulative harm and the exponential effects of living with multiple adversities (domestic abuse, parental mental ill health, substance misuse, disabilities etc). Child protection is a pivotal interdisciplinary academic and practice discipline and as such she influences boundaries between these domains, with work reflected in interdisciplinary policy contexts. She is the author of eight books and over 100 academic articles.