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In this chapter we want to demonstrate, using the example of Poland, that the socio-cultural context is important in achieving the social policy objectives of women’s professional activation and investing in children. The chapter is based on secondary analysis of data from sociological research and available public statistics (national and international) and legal documents. The thesis of the chapter refers to the theoretical concept indicated by Birgit Pfau-Effinger.

We take the view of the German sociologist Birgit Pfau-Effinger on the twofold, partially contradictory, mutual relations, and tensions between culture, institutions, social structures, and individuals who formulate the social context of female employment and child care in society. The said researcher emphasizes that the effects of similar solutions implemented in social policies in different countries vary considerably depending on the cultural context. The authors chose the subject matter of the chapter because of the changes introduced in Poland in recent years in social policy relating to the care of small children. They deal with new legal solutions that increase men’s participation in care by introducing new forms of leave for fathers.

The value of the chapter lies in pointing out the weakness of the technocratic implementation of public policies in the absence of “sociological imagination and sensitivity.” This is typical for countries in transition and post-transition periods, which includes Poland. Poor rooting of cultural knowledge and analysis in the area of programming and implementation of public policies generate a variety of social tensions.

This paper aims to make the case for early action approaches with migrant families, introducing a set of principles for practice, mapped against the Professional Capabilities Framework for social work and the Social Work England professional standards.

The paper first explores the context of social work with migrant families, outlining the challenges and gaps in our conceptual understanding of this work. The paper then introduces a conceptual model of work with migrant families which draws on the literature from social work and allied professions, and informed by social work values and ethics.

Current social work practice with migrant children has been criticised as defensive, procedural and lacking a coherent conceptual basis, particularly for those who are subject to the no recourse to public funds (NRPF) rule. This field of social work practice would benefit from an evidence-informed model of practice, anchored in human rights approaches and focused on early action. Eight principles, drawn from existing good practice in other social work and social care contexts, are outlined as the basis for a new model of practice in social work with migrant families.

The NRPF rule is a provision in the immigration rules that prevents people who are subject to immigration control from claiming most social security benefits in the UK. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in research about the NRPF rule and its negative impact on children. However, there is currently no evaluated model of social work practice for children and families with NRPF.

Loretta Bass, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma, earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Connecticut in 1998. Dr. Bass focuses her research on children and stratification issues in West Africa and the U.S. For her dissertation, Working for Peanuts: Children’s Work in Open-Air Markets in Senegal, she collected and examined both qualitative and quantitative data of child workers and their families. Dr. Bass lived in Senegal from 1994 to 1996, and completed follow-up research in Senegal during the summer of 2000. Her chapter in this collection draws on this research. Her research has appeared in the Population Research and Policy Review, Political Behavior, Anthropology of Work Review, and the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy.Marilou C. Legazpi Blair is the Assistant Director of Institutional Research at Erie Community College. She received her Ph.D. from Penn State, and has performed a substantial amount of research on issues of child development. Aside from her interests in adolescent status attainment, she has also studied the impact of immigration on both adults and children in the United States. She is currently involved in an examination of adults who return to school for the continuation of uncompleted degree work.Sampson Lee Blair is an Associate Professor at The State University of New York at Buffalo. As a family sociologist, most of his research to date has focused on family relationships, and particularly those between parents and children. More recently, he has been involved in studies of justice issues within the familial context. He recently completed his term as editor of Sociological Inquiry, and is scheduled to be a co-editor of Social Justice Research next year.Sally Bould is Professor of Sociology at the University of Delaware with a joint appointment in the department of Individual and Family Studies. She has published numerous articles in the area of the family, family policy and poverty policy. Another article on this research concerning families and neighborhoods will appear in the 2003 Journal of Family Issues. She is the author of the book, Eighty-five Plus, which examines issues of state and family responsibilities for the oldest old and several articles on the oldest old population in the United States, including disability, caregiving and living arrangements. Currently she is a member of the board of The Carework Network.Tiffani Chin recently finished her Ph.D. in Sociology at UCLA. Her dissertation examined how children’s peer cultures intersect with the schools’ social, academic, and evaluative objectives to influence children’s educational experiences. She is currently a Post-Doctoral Scholar with the Middle School Transition Study, studying oppositional culture and students’ transition from elementary school to middle school. Chin is the author of “‘Sixth Grade Madness’: Parental emotion work in the private high school application process” (Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, April 2000) and a co-author of Tutoring Matters: Everything you ever wanted to know about how to tutor (Temple 1999).Amitai Etzioni is the first University Professor of The George Washington University. He served as president of the American Sociological Association from 1994 to 1995, was Senior Advisor to the White House from 1979 to 1980, and was guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in 1978–1979. From 1958 to 1978, he served as Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He is the editor of The Responsive Community: Rights and Responsibilities, a Communitarian quarterly. He is the author of twenty-one books, including The Monochrome Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Next: The Road to the Good Society (New York: Basic Books, 2001), The Limits of Privacy (New York: Basic Books, 1999), and The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society (New York: Basic Books, 1996), which received the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 1997 Tolerance Book Award.David A. Kinney received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Indiana University-Bloomington and did post-doctoral work at the University of Chicago. He is currently Associate Professor of Sociology at Central Michigan University and a faculty affiliate at the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life at the University of Michigan. His publications have appeared in Sociology of Education, Youth and Society, Personal Relationships During Adolescence (Sage), and New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development (Jossey-Bass). He is currently conducting ethnographic research with children and their parents in a study of how families manage work, home life, and children’s activity involvement in a fast-paced society.Jennie Jacobs Kronenfeld is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, Arizona State University. She holds a doctorate (1976) and a master’s (1973) in sociology from Brown University and a B.A. (1971) in sociology and history from the University of North Carolina. She has published over ninety articles and book chapters in medical sociology, public health, medicine, and health services research. She has authored or co-authored fifteen books, on topics such as the social and economic impact of coronary artery bypass surgery, the federal role in health policy, public versus private models of service delivery in several different human services areas, controversial issues in health care policy and schools and child health services. Her current research interests include health policy issues, especially access to health care and child health care issues, and research on preventive aspects of health care.Yun-Suk Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is completing his doctoral dissertation on the role of familial relationship in the effect of performance of household tasks on subjective outcomes for children and married people. His research includes comparing several measures of time spent on housework, and studying about changes in working time. In the fall of 2002, he became a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute.Anna B. V. Madamba is a Research Associate at TIAA-CREF in New York City. With a doctorate in demography, most of her research interests are in the field of educational attainment and performance. Her current research involves the examination of the academic performance of children of single mothers.Kimberly A. Mahaffy is Assistant Professor of Sociology. Her research interests are gender, transitions to adulthood, and adolescent sexual risk taking. She recently edited a special issue for the Journal of Mundane Behavior entitled Mundane Sex. She teaches statistics, research methods, social psychology, social problems, and a senior seminar in gender and adolescence at Millersville University of Pennsylvania.Sarah H. Matthews is Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State University. Her current research focuses on the everyday lives of children whose mothers are in a drug treatment program. Her earlier research in the sociology of aging has appeared in gerontology and family journals. Her research on relationships among members of older families is reported in a forthcoming book, Sisters and Brothers/Daughters and Sons: Meeting the Needs of Old Parents.Kathleen M. Mathieson is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology, Arizona State University. She holds a master’s degree in Sociology from ASU. Her research interests focus on medical sociology, including concerns of aging, child health and mental health as impacted by work and family conflicts. She has published on the maintenance of functional independence for the elderly, and has presented papers on this topic as well as on child health and child health policy issues.Meredith Phillips is Assistant Professor of Policy Studies and Sociology at UCLA. Phillips’s research focuses on the relationship between social inequality and academic success. Her current projects include a mixed-method study of the academic achievement of college students at a highly-selective university, an ethnographic study of the development of oppositional culture during students’ transition from elementary to middle school, and a statistical study of the distribution of school quality nationally. Phillips is the co-editor of The Black-White Test Score Gap (Brookings, 1998).Katherine Brown Rosier is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at Central Michigan University. Her recent book, Mothering Inner-city Children. The Early School Years, was published in 2000 by Rutgers University Press. Other publications have appeared in The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Human Development, The Journal of Comparative Family Studies, and several other journals and edited volumes. While continuing to write on experiences of low-income African American children and families, she is also conducting research and writing a book with colleague Scott L. Feld on Louisiana’s Covenant Marriage.Barbara Schneider is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and the Co-Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Center on Parents, Children, and Work. Author of several books, articles and monographs, Dr. Schneider is concerned with encouraging the cognitive and social development of America’s children by reshaping the responsibilities of families, schools, and society. Most recently Dr. Schneider has completed two books, The Ambitious Generation: America’s Teenagers, Motivated but Directionless, and Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work. In both works she discusses how adolescents develop attitudes, skills and expectations about their adult careers.Kimberly A. Scott, Ed.D. is Assistant Professor in Hofstra University’s Foundations, Leadership, and Policy Studies department. She specializes in sociology of education, sociology of childhood, and qualitative research methods. Her research interests include examinations of race, class, and gender influences on the social and academic self-development of elementary school students. She has publications in Equity and Excellence, Journal of Negro Education, and Childhood: A Global Journal of Childhood Research. Currently, she is co-authoring a Rowmann and Littlefield book with Sarane Book entitled, Sociology of Children and Childhood.Linda J. Waite, Ph.D. is the Lucy Flower Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Center on Parents, Children and Work at the University of Chicago, where she also directs the Center on Aging. She is past Chair of the Family Section of the American Sociological Association and Past President of the Population Association of America. Her current research interests include the working family, especially dual-career couples with children and the impact of job characteristics on parenting. She is also interested in the role of the family at older ages in functioning of individuals, intergenerational transfers and exchanges, and employment. She has published widely on the family, including an award-winning book with Frances Goldscheider, New Families, No Families: The Transformation of the American Home. Her most recent book, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially, with Maggie Gallagher, won the 2000 book award from the Coalition for Marriage, Family, and Couples Education.

This chapter considers the mobilities of families subject to child protection involvement at the threshold of the birth of a new baby. The author presents data arising from an ethnographic study of child protection social work with unborn babies. This study aimed to draw near to social work practice within the Scottish context through mobile research methods and included non-participant observations of a range of child protection meetings with expectant families. Research interviews were sought with expectant mothers and fathers, social workers and the chair persons of Pre-birth Child Protection Case Conferences. Case conferences are formal administrative meetings designed to consider the risks to children, including unborn children. This chapter focusses on the experiences of expectant parents of navigating the child protection involvement with their as yet unborn infant. The strategies that parents adopted to steer a course through the multiple possibilities in relation to the future care of their infant are explored here. Three major strategies: resistance, defeatism and holding on are considered. These emerged as means by which expectant parents responded to social work involvement and which enabled their continued forwards motion towards an uncertain future.

There are often calls for more focus on outcomes in Children’s Social Care yet there is little consensus on what these outcomes should be. Key challenges include who should decide what outcomes should be measured and the sheer range of issues that social workers deal with. The purpose of this paper is to provide a reflective account of approaches to measuring outcomes that the author has used in recent studies in order to illustrate the complexity involved in understanding what the purpose of Children’s Social Care is and therefore how outcomes might be measured.

A review of and reflection on lessons from recent research studies carried out by the author and colleagues.

The results are used to illustrate and support an argument that Children’s Social Care performs multiple functions and that this has implications for thinking about outcomes. Helping children and parents is one element of the work, but assessing risk across large numbers of referrals and identifying those that require involvement is equally important. Furthermore, the social work role requires complex considerations around liberty and the rights of parents and children. One consequence of this is that the quality of the service provided is important in its own right.

It is suggested that the evaluation of Children’s Social Care involves four types of outcomes: measures of the quality of the service provided; assessment of whether the “right” families are being worked with; client-defined measures of change; and the development of appropriate standardised instruments. Examples of approaches in each area are discussed.

The theoretical considerations suggest that we need to have a multi-dimensional approach to evaluating, inspecting and leading Children’s Social Care services. In particular, the importance of the quality of delivery and appropriate targeting of the service are emphasised, as well as considering various approaches to measuring outcomes.

The paper proposes a combination of qualitative and quantitative measures of process, assessment and outcomes for evaluating outcomes in Children’s Social Care.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on progress and lessons in improving the social work system in England in the interests of children and families.

Based on an interview with the author by Michael Little (one of the Guest Editors of this edition).

Social work is best placed to lead the child protection system given its ability to manage risks in a challenging social and political environment. However, there is a need to address common concerns about the system, for instance to give social workers more autonomy, and to improve the quality in the workforce, especially at the senior level. The best authorities are practice focused, led by practitioners who are part of a stable team, and do well at a systems level.

Offers the perspective of the Chief Social Worker for Children in England on the process of reforming the social work system for children and families.

The purpose of this monograph is to present the first English translation of a unique French colonial report on women living under colonial rule in West Africa.

The issue begins with a discussion of the contribution this report makes to the history of social development policy in Africa, and how it serves the on‐going critique of colonisation. This is followed by the English translation of the original report held in the National Archives of Senegal. The translation is accompanied by explanatory notes, translator’s comments, a glossary of African and technical terms, and a bibliography.

The discussion highlights contemporary social development policies and practices which featured in identical or similar forms in French colonial social policy.

As the report demonstrates, access to basic education and improving maternal/infant health care have dominated the social development agenda for women in sub‐Saharan Africa for over a century, and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future in the Millennium Development Goals which define the international community’s agenda for social development to 2015. The parallels between colonial and post‐colonial social policies in Africa raise questions about the philosophical and cultural foundations of contemporary social development policy in Africa and the direction policy is following in the 21st century.

Though the discussion adopts a consciously postcolonial perspective, the report that follows presents a consciously colonial view of the “Other”. Given the parallels identified here between contemporary and colonial policy‐making, this can only add to the value of the document in exploring the values that underpin contemporary social development practice.

This research aimed to describe and examine the effects of war followed by forced displacement on Syrian mothers and their children in terms of Reuben Hill's Family Stress Theory and identify essential elements to consider in social work practice with this population.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 Syrian mothers living in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). A thematic analysis at both a semantic and latent level was completed. A case study – “Noor” – was developed to offer insight into one Syrian woman's experiences and response to war-related stressors and displacement.

The findings from the analysis of the interviews and case study indicated that for Syrian families displaced by conflict the traumas of war were compounded by ongoing and multiple emotional and practical stressors, with ongoing experiences of “loss” being the significant stressor. Giving context to these findings highlights the demand and impost on the host countries, in this study, the UAE, to continue their significant humanitarian efforts to Syrian families.

These findings will assist social workers, humanitarian organisations and their staff and others working with Syrian families, to respond more effectively.

There is no research in evidence in the professional literature that addresses the effects of war on displaced Syrian families in terms of Reuben Hill's Family Stress Theory.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how innovation in children’s services is adopted and developed by staff within new multi-disciplinary children’s safeguarding teams. It draws on diffusion of innovations (DOI) theory to help us better understand the mechanisms by which the successful implementation of multi-disciplinary working can be best achieved.

It is based on interviews with 61 frontline safeguarding staff, including social workers, substance misuse workers, mental health workers and domestic abuse workers. Thematic analysis identified the enablers and barriers to implementation.

DOI defines five innovation attributes as essential for rapid diffusion: relative advantage over current practice; compatibility with existing values and practices; complexity or simplicity of implementation; trialability or piloting of new ideas; and observability or seeing results swiftly. Staff identified multi-disciplinary team working and group supervision as advantageous, in line with social work values and improved their service to children and families. Motivational interviewing and new ways of case recordings were less readily accepted because of the complexity of practicing confidently and concerns about the risks of moving away from exhaustive case recording which workers felt provided professional accountability.

DOI is a useful reflective tool for senior managers to plan and review change programmes, and to identify any emerging barriers to successful implementation.

The paper provides insights into what children’s services staff value about multi-disciplinary working and why some aspects of innovation are adopted more readily than others, depending on the perception of diffusion attributes.

In the context of current developments in children ' s services in the UK and increased emphasis on workforce development, the authors describe a survey of successful completers of a Post-qualifying (PQ) Child Care Award Programme, one of 18 such programmes in England that ran between 2001 and 2006/7. The survey ' s aims were twofold: first, to gather the respondents ' overall evaluations of their PQ training and information about their past and current work circumstances; and second, to explore their knowledge and opinions on the latest developments in children ' s services in relation to their own work practices. The findings from the survey are outlined under four themes, which are then discussed in relation to other relevant studies, reviews on the role and tasks of social workers and current developments associated with the Every Child Matters agenda and the integrated workforce. Concerns are raised about whether social work professionalism is being effectively utilised within the current children ' s services arrangements.