Tony Stanley

• Consultant at Oranga Tamariki

Review of 'A political history of child protection: Lessons for reform from Aotearoa New Zealand' by Ian Kelvin Hyslop Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022. ISBN 978-1-4473-5318-8, 214pp., Paperback, GBP24.99

Most systems of child welfare promote some form of practice framework or practice approach, with inspectorates reinforcing the need for such. Yet the extent to which practice frameworks are sufficiently embedded and therefore driving good and improving practice is not clear or well understood. Practice frameworks can help social workers be more con...

Much of the practice leadership literature is focused on people and their roles — the who and what of leading, thus neglecting the organisational environment and wider socio-economic and political influences. Taking an ethnographic and sociological approach, we argue for a reimagining of practice leadership as a series of verbs to explore the why a...

Statutory social work is in the business of risk work. The work involves decision making about risky events and situations and yet we know very little about how this operates in an everyday practical sense. The risk work associated with terrorism and radicalisation concerns best illustrates this. The PREVENT statutory duty was sanctioned mid 2015 f...

Rising demand for early help services is currently taking place against a backdrop of closing or reduced services and shrinking public authority budgets across England. Complicating matters is the wide variety of service orientations and differences in assessments offered to vulnerable families. This can be confusing for them. Moreover, this is an...

In recent times, young British Muslims have become objects of the official discursive construction of ‘vulnerability to radicalisation’ within UK counterterrorism law, policy and practice. This chapter critiques and contests the assumptions and arguments within vulnerability to radicalisation discourse that give legitimacy to pre-emptive practices...

‘Radicalisation risk’ and the associated practice and organisational responses to it are accepted, rather uncritically, as legitimate activity for statutory social workers. Yet, the policy backdrop driving much of this development has not been matched by practice debate or learning about how best to work with these cases. The 2015 PREVENT Duty mand...

In July 2015, a new statutory duty was sanctioned in the UK for a range of professional practitioners, including social workers, to pay ‘due regard to preventing terrorism’. The duty has contributed to a shifting of social work practice and decision-making from the fields of advocacy and promotion of ethics, social justice and human rights, towards...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the signs of safety and wellbeing practice framework offers a practical and logical reinforcement for the Making Safeguarding Personal programme within the practice context of the Care Act. The new practice framework orientates safeguarding practice to be person led and person centred while rei...

In carrying out everyday duties, statutory social workers make sense of risk. Understandably then, the language of risk is drawn on discursively to help define, classify, and decide a course of action to protect children from danger and harm (Coppock & McGovern, 2014; Featherstone, 2013; Kemshall, 2010; Stanley, 2013; Webb, 2006). Social workers do...

Understanding how excellent practice is enabled is an important question for organisational and professional leaders to ask and work towards answering. But, what are the conditions needed for a great organisational culture? And, how can we find out? How do we promote and build on what works well? Social service organisations are complex — making th...

Child welfare is an emotive and complicated area of social work practice. Child welfare not only has its own internal complexities but also attracts immense political and media scrutiny every time a child abuse tragedy plays out. In addition, the working lives of human service workers take place inside organizations that are themselves in the publi...

Terrorism, radicalisation and risk are contested terms — converging around particular children and young people in England to construct an emergent category of abuse — ‘childhood radicalisation’. With little practice-based research to date in this issue and expected responses via the state, social work needs to step up and engage with the present t...

Excellent social work can transform people’s lives. The Munro Review of Child Protection reinforced this message by advocating higher practice standards, and the development of organisational learning cultures. One of Professor Munro’s recommendations was the appointment of principal child and family social workers toward this end. The authors of t...

Very little research has been conducted on how statutory social workers undertake their risk investigations into alleged child abuse. Moreover, very little research has explored the risk discourses as utilised and understood by social workers. For my doctoral work, I set out to learn from child welfare workers as they ‘talked’ about risk, to hear t...

Good practice for safeguarding children by health and social care means having the individual confidence to take considered risks in practice and the institutional support that encourages it. Yet, this is not easy to achieve or widely promoted across health and social care organisations. The pressure to ‘get things right’ very much dominates health...

This article draws on an ethnographic research project that examined how New Zealand child protection social workers discussed decision making about reported risks for children. The study involved a combination of detailed interviews and observations of social work practice in social work offices from late 2002 to mid 2003. In this article, I show...

The Munro review of child protection explains in depth the contemporary challenges in delivering statutory child protection services. It notes that complexity, uncertainty and emotional challenges inherent in social work are contemporary issues not resolved through new national guidance or more bureaucratic procedures. Rather, practice needs reform...

Ethnographic researchers entering sensitive fields of research become entangled in ethical dilemmas when they encounter \'sticky\' questions, situations and issues. In undertaking research within two distinct sex worlds: female sex work and male sexual negotiation/risk and HIV, we struggled to manage the contingent links between our relationships w...

Contemporary reforms of social work assessment practice and policy, best evidenced by the 2001 introduction of The Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families, principally aimed at ensuring consistent and safer outcomes for children and their families, has resulted in a state of practice paralysis resulting in an over-zealou...

Social work students and practitioners often struggle to apply sociological theories to practice situations. This is made difficult because the application of sociological theory for social work is still a contested area. To assist students and practitioners articulate and explain sociological theory in their social work practice, this paper introd...

Social work practice invariably means attention to both human and non-human aspects of the work. It is now widely argued that spending time on computers and bureaucratic requirements comes at the expense of direct work with families and children. But this is a simplistic dualism. This paper advocates a move beyond this dualism through three broad a...

Social work practice invariably means attention to ‘risk’ and its multiple and at times contested meanings. This article reports on a series of workshops, held in New Zealand and London, with social workers and their supervisors, where we considered how the language of risk acts as a powerful influence in and through our practice. A central idea in...

This article explores the recent establishment, practice delivery and initial evaluation of a Child in Need (CIN) reviewing service. The practice of reviewing is explored in detail. In particular, the role of genograms and ecomaps as tools to enhance preparation, participation and planning at CIN review meetings is discussed. There are always chall...

Sociology provides one of the necessary analytic frameworks for the making sense of social issues; issues that directly affect social work practice. Nevertheless, the application of sociological theory in practice is a contested area of social work. To assist the application of sociological theory in social work practice, this paper introduces a pr...

The introduction of a differential response model to the New Zealand child protection system is an important social policy initiative. However, the differential response literature has yet to address the role that risk discourses play as organising and regulatory regimes in contemporary child protection work, and this paper addresses this gap. Chil...

This study considers one way to make more productive use of information in a recognised survey instrument, the Parental Attitudes to Inclusion (PATI) scale and, thus, to enhance inclusive classroom practice for students with special needs. The instrument, designed to elicit views about inclusion, was initially administered to a large sample of Cali...

Yes Yes

Perceptions of inclusion held by 16 teachers of included students were collated and analysed together with data from a previous study of 10 parents of included children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). The initial study that examined parental attitudes about Australian regular school settings used an established American scale, the 11-item Pa...

Through practices of assessment and consultation, information gathering and analysis, social workers, in the field of child protection, build understandings about children and families. Social workers actively construct knowledge as they engage in assessments of children referred to them as potentially 'at risk'. Their work is always informed by ex...

Typescript (photocopy). Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Canterbury, 2005. Includes bibliographical references (p. 296-315).