This thesis discusses the relationships between local authority social workers, managers and solicitors in child care cases under the Children Act 1989. The original focus was social workers and lawyers, but as work progressed the importance of the social services manager became clear. The empirical work involved 54 semistructured interviews with members of the three groups between March 2001 and April 2002. The findings show that the relationships usually worked well enough, but that tensions were never far beneath the surface and could break out in resentment and frustration. The tensions are rooted in the disjunction between the popular mantra 'the lawyer advises, the client instructs' and the much more complex relationships that the professionals experience in practice. Lawyers may give their advice very forcefully, and can sometimes resist instructions; social workers sometimes rely on the lawyers more closely than any of the groups consider ideal. Behind these difficulties lie the diverse and potentially incompatible responsibilities held by each group, competing notions of reasonableness, different approaches to risk and the challenges of managing limited resources. The tensions provoke powerful criticisms of each group by the others - lawyers don't fight hard enough, social workers don't analyse their cases properly, managers don't supervise their staff adequately. Flexibility, tact and communication are required to keep relationships working well. At a theoretical level, the tensions between and within the three groups are seen to reflect and construct tensions between and within three key discourses in contemporary child care work welfare, law and managerialism. The relationships between the three professional groups reproduce the relationships between these three paradigmatic approaches to, and technologies of, social and professional regulation. The implication for professional practice and social policy is to recognise and value the challenging benefits of dynamic interaction between the professional groups and the discourses.

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This thesis is an in-depth examination of the practice of the Children and Families Court Advisory and Support Service in working with the 'race' and culture of black minority ethnic families in contested contact and residence applications. It aims to arrive at a model of good practice in working with black families and at mechanisms to achieve this practice. The thesis is rooted in an anti-racist perspective and focuses on the service to those who are vulnerable to colour-based racism- black children and families. It is also rooted in a black feminist perspective and its focus encompasses differences in experiences of culture, oppression and privilege. Its methodology is qualitative with an emphasis on involving black communities, practitioners and service users in contributing to the framework within which practice is examined and presented and on hearing multiple voices. The research involved a triangulation of methods: focus groups, semi-structured interviews with practitioners and service users, the reading of court reports and organisational questionnaires to managers and administrators. The majority of service users interviewed and families in the court reports read were South Asian.

nterprofessional working can be regarded as both a response to complex' problems and a source of additional complexity. In the context of children's services, there has been little research into what complexity actually means for practitioners working together in the team around the child. Drawing on the results of a qualitative research study, this thesis explores the phenomenon of complexity as something that is experienced by practitioners in complex cases, and constructed in their accounts of collaborative casework. For the study, core groups in two complex child protection cases were approached within an outer London children's trust and seventeen practitioners agreed to take part in semi-structured interviews. Interview transcripts were analysed using two different qualitative methods: interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPAI and critical discourse analysis (CDA). The findings reveal complexity to be a multi-facetted phenomenon. It is shown how the dynamics of complex systems feed into relationships, processes of assessment and intervention, and the management of risk. Practitioners' accounts of complexity are built on the conflict and congruence between different orders of discourse relating to professional and interprofessional practice. The findings enable a critical re -engagement with the literature on integrated children's services and child protection. The implications of complexity are discussed in terms of socio-technical systems and the question of how best to facilitate interprofessional working in the team around the child. Some suggestions are made for policy and practice in this area.

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This thesis is about how the concept of participation constructs children as subjects within social welfare formations. It is the result of a qualitative and interpretive research project using narrative and discourse analysis as key methodologies. The research is theoretically framed within the social constructionist, post-structuralist, feminist and psychoanalytic perspectives. By using these the thesis explores the competing constructions of children’s participation within social/legal policy texts and the discourses of social care. The focus is on children within contemporary UK welfare contexts who are either identified as being ‘at risk’ of significant harm or who are Looked After by the local authority. I examine the way that children’s participation is framed by the Children Act, 1989 (England and Wales), the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and Quality Protects. I analyse the policy and interview texts to show how the discourses of protectionism, developmentalism, rights and managerialism compete unevenly across them. I argue that there is a new configuration of welfare developing around children’s services where managerialism is dominant and children’s rights are collapsed into the customer discourse. Children’s voices are either absent or mediated by adult/professionals in most of the formal policy texts. This thesis explores the affective and emotional aspects of performing participation with children. My data shows how individual professionals as well as the institutions of welfare experience anxiety and strain about how to enable and manage the participation of children. I show how professionals and welfare institutions develop various coping strategies, whose effects include the avoidance of the difficulties of listening to children.

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The Relational Approach to group work was developed during the UK-based Social Pedagogic Research into Group-work project (SPRinG). The Approach is built upon the premise that children will need support to ensure they can engage in, and benefit socially and cognitively from interactions with their peers. The SPRinG research found that, in schools where the Relational Approach was developed, there were positive gains for teachers and pupils, including: increased pupil-peer cooperation; widening of pupils' social networks; and improved pupil attainment in reading and Mathematics. This thesis adopts a social constructivist methodology to explore the development of the Relational Approach to group work with children aged thirty to sixty months within one pre- school. A number of data collection tools, including interview, sociometry and video recording, were employed to explore the development of the Approach and its impact on children's peer interactions, and on practitioner pedagogy and practice. Data were analysed utilising an appropriate combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, for example content analysis of video data. A major finding of this research is that developing the Relational Approach to group work within the pre-school led to changes in practitioner pedagogy and practice, which positively impacted upon the development of children's social competencies. Using the example of the Relational Approach to explore the role of the pre-school practitioner, a series of five mediating factors are identified which together provide a framework for practitioner pedagogy and practice to support the development of children's social competencies. These five factors are that practitioners should: understand the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of relational programmes and activities; provide a suitable setting in which positive relationships and the development of social competencies can thrive; reflect upon their practice and observe children's behaviours and use the knowledge gained to develop their practice accordingly; hold expectations that the children are capable of developing social competencies and make these expectations explicit; and model the desired social competencies to children. The framework provides a useful guide for all practitioners working with young children, particularly those who wish to improve the quality of their practice and for those who wish to ensure children benefit socially and cognitively from interactions with their peers.