Resources Database

Restorative justice is an approach that focuses on collaboration between the offender and the community. It requires the offender to accept responsibility for their decisions and the impact of their offenses on the victim and the community. For juvenile offenders who are involved in both the juvenile justice and child welfare systems, restorative practices often involve teaching skills to live independently and develop healthy relationships.

The U.S. Court Improvement Program provides Federal funds to State and Tribal courts to support efforts to improve child welfare court practices, including collaboration between courts and child welfare agencies. This factsheet from the U.S. Child Welfare Information Gateway focuses on collaboration and relationship building between legal and judicial communities and child welfare agencies and provides several examples of successful and promising approaches.

i-RESTORE 2.0 project builds on the i-RESTORE project, which focused on promoting the use of restorative justice in cases involving child victims of crime and strengthening the capacities of justice professionals. Based on the results of that project, i-RESTORE 2.0 was drafted to go a step further and create accessible quality restorative justice processes for children in contact with the law.

The war in Ukraine has been devastating for the country’s children, particularly those in the most vulnerable situations, including children without parental care, children with disabilities, children at risk of family separation, those residing in residential institutions, as well as those who have been evacuated from such institutions during the war.

On May 31, 2023, Data for Impact (D4I) hosted a webinar on preparing future social workers for data-driven practice. This webinar was presented in English and Romanian, with simultaneous interpretation. Use of data is indispensable in today’s social work practice.

The blurring of the boundaries and interconnectedness between learning and work are features worth exploring in the contemporary supervision landscape. Grounded on transitionexperiential learning theories, the study analysed a social service organisation as a context for learning and examined how this context facilitated or inhibited supervision learning experiences for first-time supervisors. It draws on the qualitative findings of thirteen in-depth interviews whose data were analysed using the thematic analysis.

The Model National Response framework was first published in 2015 as a non-prescriptive and dynamic tool that sets out the capabilities needed to ensure an effective and coordinated national response to prevent and respond to child sexual exploitation and abuse online.

This report examines the indispensable role of child helplines in emergencies and crises, with a specific focus on Russia’s War in Ukraine. It outlines the diverse range of services provided by helplines during such times, from ensuring that children’s basic needs are met and offering essential mental health support, to more indirect services such as advocacy and data collection.

Child Protection Professionals (CPPs) play a key role in providing insights into the child protection system and how it can best support children’s right to personal security, particularly during trying times like the COVID-19 pandemic. Qualitative research provides one potential tool to tap into this knowledge and awareness. This research thus expanded earlier qualitative work on CPPs’ perceptions of the impact of COVID-19 on their work, including potential struggles and barriers, into the context of a developing country.

The responsibility of local authorities in England to provide children in care with stable, local placements has become increasingly difficult due to the rising number of children in need of care and a shortage of available placements. It is unclear if the trend of outsourcing children's social care to private companies has exacerbated this challenge. This paper examines how the outsourcing of children's social care to the private market has influenced placement locality and long-term stability over time.

While Changing the Way We Care has focused on systems change since the beginning, it was not always underpinned by a conceptual framework. Even without applying the scaling conceptual framework developed, Changing the Way We Care has found that focusing on systems strengthening alone has helped drive scale-up.

The examples in this Insights Learning Brief describe how systems strengthening alone can lead to scaling of interventions, including interventions that already exist.

School social workers are integral to the school mental health workforce and the leading social service providers in educational settings. In recent decades, school social work practice has been largely influenced by the multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) approach, ecological systems views, and the promotion of evidence-based practice. However, none of the existing school social work reviews have examined the latest characteristics and outcomes of school social work services.

This article sets out key issues in determining and upholding the best interests of children, in need of social service support, who have family networks that span outside of the UK. These issues are then analysed against whether and how child protection professionals take these into account along with an overall consideration of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child’s (UNCRC) ‘best interests of the child’, when assessing and planning for those needs in kinship care cases.

This special issue of the British Journal of Social Work sought to attract academic papers of the same quality and integrity as those published regularly in the journal, the key differentiation being that a person with lived experience of social work had to be the lead or solo author. Areas covered by the articles in this issue include contemporary social work concerns such as mental health, the effect of the pandemic on carers, institutional care, perspectives on autism, a critique of life story work, communication between parents and children in out-of-home care and insights into people w

This brief, from the U.S. Child Welfare Information Gateway, explores what the research shows about the overlap among families experiencing poverty and those reported to the child welfare system for neglect, the societal context within which both poverty and neglect exist, and strategies that have proven effective for preventing and addressing both poverty and neglect, together.

This resource, from the U.S. Center for States' Childwelfare Capacity Building Program, provides information on how to partner with young people to discuss redesigning the child welfare service array to meet the needs of youth and young adults currently and formerly in foster care, focusing on topics such as housing, healthcare and mental health, substance use disorder treatment, and education. Each section of this publication discusses: 

Let’s Talk Social Work Podcast examined the U.K. Government’s strategy for children’s social care in England, Stable Homes Built on Love, and kinship care. Andy McClenaghan is joined by kinship carer, Natalie Boyes, Sam Turner, Head of Policy and Public Affairs at the charity Kinship, and Dr Paul Shuttleworth, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Education and Social Work at Sussex University.

This paper proposes a framework for comprehensive, collaborative, and community-based care (C4) for accessible mental health services in low-resource settings. Because mental health conditions have many causes, this framework includes social, public health, wellness and clinical services. It accommodates integration of stand-alone mental health programs with health and non-health community-based services.