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This article explores the neglected issue of the overrepresentation in the child protection system of children from ethnic, cultural, religious, racial, and linguistic minorities. It focuses on the accommodation of children’s diverse backgrounds within the s 31(2) threshold and s1 “best interests” stages of intervention under the Children Act 1989. First, it introduces the ethnic child protection penalty as a new tool for capturing the complex nature of overrepresentation of these children. Second, it proposes a framework for understanding the judicial approach in higher court decisions on the current extent and nature of accommodation. Third, it employs the penalty concept to help explain why case law analysis reveals difficulties with the current factor-based approach, whereas empirical research suggests generally satisfactory accommodation in practice. It concludes by proposing a contextualized framework for decision-making in relation to child protection.

Given pressures both to share and to protect personal information in inter‐agency service provision, this article reviews the ways in which policy and legal influences shape interorganisational information exchange and highlights key developments in government guidance that are designed to promote better information sharing.

This article provides a case study that examines the relationship between records management and change management. The study focuses on a three‐year phase of intensive change management in a leading national children's charity, The Children's Society. During this period, records management became a key tool in the change management process, generating positive benefits for all stakeholders. Change causes uncertainty, fluidity and the distortion of organisational structures that can lead to the loss of business records and information. At The Children's Society records management introduced structures and systems into the change process, ensuring the retention of records to meet the needs of good governance, accountability, research and practice learning, and provide children and young people with future access to personal case file records.

This article is based on a contribution to a national conference held in April 2003 entitled ‘After Victoria: Learning from Experience and Research’. It aims to look beyond the focus of child protection in the Laming Report (2003), and suggests that the goal of inter‐professional care in ethnically diverse communities may encounter some particular barriers because of race. The article's purpose is to evaluate critically, against established research evidence, what impact ethnicity had on the way Victoria was perceived and assessed by the different professionals and organisations involved in her short life in England, before she died. The themes include the problems of working with individuals and families who are not habitually resident in the UK, the complexities of challenging people from minority ethnic backgrounds, the difficulties of using interpreters, the challenges in assessing minority ethnic families, and intra‐ and inter‐agency tensions in work with such families. All these themes are contextualised within the evidence available in the Laming Report. The article is intended to help organisations and staff understand some of the complexities concerning ethnicity and collaborative working, with the hope of an improvement in practice and policy.

This article examines the substance and recommendations of the Laming Report into the death of Victoria Climbié. It discusses the implications from a risk‐management perspective, for clinical and non‐clinical professionals involved in child healthcare. It examines relevant recent literature, concerning general principles in adverse clinical outcomes, and discusses the specific advice of the Laming Report. It focuses on information handling, active and latent failures and record keeping. It aims to provide a framework in which to consider change in paediatric healthcare and system management, in order to decrease the risk of adverse outcomes of the type experienced in the case of Victoria Climbié.

Like most western developed countries, there have been inquiries in England and Wales from time to time into the deaths of children who have been under the watch of social services or other agencies. These cases have led to significant reforms and contributed in part to the Children Act 1989, landmark legislation that has defined the state's involvement in the lives of children in England and Wales. The case of Victoria Climbié was particularly distressing. Born in the Ivory Coast, Victoria died just over eight years later from 128 separate injuries after being bound hand and foot in plastic bags and placed in a cold bath in an unheated bathroom, where she lay in her own urine and faeces, able to eat only what she could by pressing her face into a plate put beside her. In the 10 months that Victoria lived in England, she was known to seven local government departments, three specialist child protection teams and two hospitals.Herbert Laming chaired the inquiry into her death. His report (Laming, 2003) has underpinned a major overhaul of children's services. Building on the 1989 legislation, the government's vision for children's services Every Child Matters (DfES, 2003) and the ensuing Children Act 2004 promise a highly integrated, outcome‐focused approach to all children in England and Wales. In this interview, Lord Laming deals with the problems that led to the death of Victoria Climbié, before covering the contribution of the new legislation and its implications for practitioners, local and central government, inspectors and researchers. He ends with some reflections on the development of children's services during his involvement over 40 years and in the future. What follows is an edited transcript of Lord Laming's comments.

This paper aims to estimate the global income distribution during the nineties using limited information. In a first stage, we obtain national income distributions considering a model with two parameters. In particular, we propose to use the so-called Lamé distributions, which are curved versions of the Sigh-Maddala and Dagum distributions. The main feature of this family is that they represent parsimonious models which can fit income data adequately with just two parameters and whose Lorenz curves are characterized by only one parameter. In a second stage, global and regional distributions are derived from a finite mixture of these families using population shares. We test the validity of the model, comparing it with other two-parameter families. Our estimates of different inequality measures suggest that global inequality presents a decreasing pattern mainly driven by the fall of the differences across countries during the course of the study period that offsets the increase in disparities within countries.

The article explores the drivers for legislative and policy change in children's social care in England over the past 60 years. It describes the factors that led to the major children's social care legislation and explores how these ‘drivers for change’ varied in their importance over time. Particular attention is given to the impact of research evidence as a driver for change among, for example tragedy and media scandal, political developments and changes in practice prompting legislative reform. The article also notes how research has at times provided a background for change while not explicitly promoting the change itself. The use of performance information and research in shaping and monitoring change is seen to have increased in the past 30 years, but with continuing tensions between a natural and necessary research timescale and the political wish for quick and clear answers to pressing issues.

This article uses a model describing different levels of collaboration to chart the development of area child protection committees (ACPCs) and their successors, local safeguarding children boards (LSCBs). It argues that concerns about these partnerships lacking ‘teeth’ have resulted in a broadening of remit and increased regulation and statutory guidance. Using criteria from the literature for effective multidisciplinary strategic partnerships, consideration is given to specific issues that members of LSCBs encounter that limit their powers and influence. The final section of the article questions whether national regulation and guidance is sufficient to give LSCBs ‘teeth’ and ensure effective local collaborative activity. The author concludes that the strength and influence of the LSCB is as dependent on the quality of leadership provided by the members of the LSCB as it is on regulation and guidance.