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An integral feature of Special Guardianship Orders (SGO) is that the children should have some contact with their parents after the order is granted. Local authority social workers have a duty to plan and recommend levels and types of contact. But there is no policy guidance provided on how to undertake these duties, and little is known about the process that practitioners undertake. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the recommending of contact in special guardianship cases, and to provide data on what contact social workers are recommending the factors they take into consideration and the reasons for their decisions.

The research involved a mixed-methods approach comprising of a questionnaire and focus groups. This part of the study comprised of an online questionnaire that was completed by 102 local authority social workers. Responses were downloaded into SPSS Statistics v22 for data analysis and a content analysis was conducted.

Quantitative results from the questionnaire are reported in this paper. Respondents provided comprehensive details on what they include in their recommendations, including levels of contact frequency and specific directions. Practitioners rated the factors they considered in reaching their decisions, and gave their general views on special guardianship contact. Results indicated that practitioners are recommending less contact for fathers than for mothers, and may feel less positively about paternal contact. Bivariate analysis suggests that some older and more experienced social workers are recommending lower levels of contact.

The statistical significance of the results was limited by the relatively small sample size. It was therefore decided to limit bivariate analyses to consideration of just three independent variables: the social worker’s age and number of years in practice, and the age of the child at the time of their SGO, against dependent variables concerning the levels of contact that had been recommended for mothers and fathers and how positive these were considered to be. Because of the limited sample size, most of the results were above this level, and so were not statistically significant.

Special guardianship has been in place for 12 years now, but apart from Jim Wade’s 2014 study there has been no major research to guide and inform practice. Such major changes in child welfare require substantiating research, and this study is an attempt to begin filling that gap. The questionnaire part of this study has for the first time provided data on the views, motivations and practice of social workers across the country making recommendations on special guardianship contact.

The study provides a picture of the type of contact being recommended for birth parents. This information will be useful for practitioners, who might otherwise not know what their colleagues in other local authorities are recommending, and it is hoped that this will encourage further debate on the subject.

Special guardianship has so far been poorly served by research. To the author’s knowledge, apart from Wade’s study there is very little research on the subject, and no significant research at all on special guardianship contact. This questionnaire, alongside the four focus groups that formed the second part of the study, provides the first picture of current practice across the country.

Special guardianship order (SGO) assessments require social workers to make plans and recommendations for ongoing post-SGO contact between the child and the parents. However, there is very little policy to inform and guide practitioners on how these duties should be undertaken, and no studies that describe current practice. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the recommending of contact in special guardianship cases is currently working, by holding focus groups with social workers and special guardians. This paper reports on the results of a study to examine what contact plans social workers are recommending, the thinking behind their decisions and the views of the special guardians who have to make those plans work.

The research involved a mixed methods approach comprising of an online questionnaire, two focus groups for social workers and two focus groups for special guardians. This paper describes the second part of the study and reports on the qualitative results from the four focus groups. The methodology was based on a pragmatist theoretical position, and used an interpretivist approach and elements of the analytical procedure of grounded theory in order to generate inductive research. The focus group method was chosen as the best way to gather rich information on the opinions and ideas of practitioners who are recommending contact and the carers who are managing it.

Participants provided a wide range of views on the issues, with practitioners describing the challenges of planning contact, and special guardians explaining the problems they faced with the parents. Involving special guardians in the study gave a chance to include the different perspectives of the people who have to make the contact recommendations work, and contrast their views on contact planning with those of the professionals. The study makes recommendations for practice, which recognise the difficulty of preparing an initial contact plan that will remain relevant for years ahead.

The number of focus groups the author held was limited by the author’s own personal resources and the time the author had available, and one group only had three social workers on the day. The author’s involvement affected the responses, and the author’s questions dictated the issues that were commented on, but the answers were the opinions that the participants wanted to express. The nature of the approach means that no two sets of focus group results would ever be the same. And as the direction of the discussions was largely dictated by the participants, the coverage of all aspects of contact was probably inconsistent.

This research sheds light on a crucial area of social work permanency planning, that has suffered from a lack of previous research, in order to better inform future practice. The paper reports on what contact plans social workers are recommending, the thinking behind their decisions and the views of the special guardians who have to make those plans work. It concludes with recommendations for improving future special guardianship policy and practice.

The research clearly raises a number of specific difficulties faced by special guardians and problems with current policy and practice. These include the special guardians’ lack of understanding about contact, the difficulty for social workers of long-term planning, the challenge posed by uncooperative parents who behave badly, the view of carers for the need for a greater emphasis on the quality and reliability of contact, and the challenge to careful contact planning posed by the adversarial court process.

Special guardianship has had a major impact on permanency planning since its introduction 12 years ago. However, apart from one DfE study in 2014, very little research has been produced to inform policy and practice. There have been no studies specifically on contact in special guardianship cases, despite contact being one of the two major factors in determining the success of SGO placements. This study has provided the first in-depth evaluation of social worker contact planning in special guardianship, and the first investigation of special guardians’ views on contact.

Special education today in the Ukraine is dramatically different than its early origins which stressed communal guardianship for persons with disabilities to its current movement to inclusive education. The journey to inclusive education was inconsistent due to a variety of elements such as the collapse of the Russian Monarchy, a series of different governments and social-political structures, World War II and membership in the USSR which stressed a unification of the education system. However, special education professionals who worked at the Special Education Pedagogy Institute of the National Academy of Pedagogical Sciences continued to research and develop a philosophical instructional framework to educate students with disabilities that includes theoretical and practical aspects of inclusive education. This chapter provides a detailed description of this framework as well as prevalence and school placements aspects, classification and assessment parameters, and the impact of legislation for free public education. The chapter concludes with challenges to inclusive education such as attitude modification, infusing necessary teacher instructional strategies, and the incorporation of best practices from special education to regular education settings.

This review sets out the legislative amendments that have been made to the Children Act 1989 since it was implemented in 1991. It highlights the most significant changes to the original wording of the Act, with brief summaries of the relevant background and references to comment by leading figures in law and social work. The review follows the structure of the Act, beginning with the welfare principle and covering: private law provisions; local authority duties to children in need; care orders; and child protection. It is concluded that the majority of the amendments have arisen through increased recognition of the impact of domestic violence on children, campaigning by the fathers' rights movements and the economic pressures on local authorities that have prevented the provision of adequate services to children in need.

This article reviews the development over the last 20 years of the section 8 powers under the Children Act 1989. In particular, it examines residence, especially shared residence, contact, prohibited steps and specific issue orders. In respect of each order, the review compares the current position with what was originally intended and more generally anticipated. The article concludes that whereas prohibited steps and specific issue orders have broadly worked as expected and intended, residence orders and contact have not. Residence orders have been used to allocate parental responsibility, which was not intended, and shared care arrangements have become much more common than anticipated. Contrary to expectation, contact disputes have proved to be exceptionally problematic and there have been consequential reforms to deal with issues. Despite these developments the overall conclusion is that the section 8 orders have generally stood the test of time and should not be regarded as being beyond their ‘sell‐by’ date.

The Children Act 1989 forms a modern and integrated legal framework for children proceedings. A victim of its own success, the Act has brought child care law into the spotlight, with more public law cases heard in judge courts and the proceedings making great demands of public funds in social work and legal spheres. There is a need to simplify the process and make more urgent the resolution of cases to better protect children in a timely way.

This paper seeks to consider the inter‐connections between law and child development, particularly in the areas of child custody and child protection, in both the USA and the UK.

The paper is based on analysis of US and UK legal systems and child developmental research.

Although the two legal systems have much in common in their approach to safeguarding children's welfare, there are also notable differences between them in terminology and in concept. Whereas the USA places a greater emphasis on the rights, particularly autonomy rights, of both parents and children, the UK justifies its laws affecting children largely in terms of parental responsibility and child need.

The paper argues that each of these legal regimes has something to learn from the other and a reader interested in thinking about the relationship between child welfare and law will profit from considering the distinctions, as well as the commonalities, between the two regimes.