Translating Intensive Family Support Lessons for Social Work Practice

This paper proposes to build on the results of a small scale research project undertaken with a comparative component. Practitioners from intensive family support services in the UK and Ireland respectively were interviewed... [ view full abstract ]

This paper proposes to build on the results of a small scale research project undertaken with a comparative component. Practitioners from intensive family support services in the UK and Ireland respectively were interviewed about their input with families. The focus of the interviews was to explore the processes involved in delivering intensive family support. This type of intensive targeted service provision was comparable in terms of interventions that had been developed in both countries, specifically aimed at engaging families characterised by multi-faceted and long standing problems.
Although the broader socio-political environment of the two research sites were not identical, due to family support being provided within different childcare systems, very similar results were found, in terms of workers’ approach & skills. Interestingly, it was these aspects that workers in both the UK and Ireland attributed for their success with ‘hard to reach’ families.
The researchers have previously presented and discussed these findings. However, this paper intends to develop these ideas in the context of important changes of direction in family support:
• Firstly, in each jurisdiction, recent changes in approach to overall child welfare provision in terms of stronger state involvement coupled with retrenchment of supportive services is examined with the use of key literature.
• Secondly, the researchers propose that the strengths based, child & family centred methodology, along with the practical and emotional support provided by the family support workers, constitutes valuable learning for social work practitioners in particular, given the current re-positioning of child social work and supportive work with families within the two jurisdictions.
The researchers aim to explore the lessons from this research from an applied perspective, marrying research, theory and practice that sheds light on effective social work engagement with vulnerable children and families within changing policy frameworks and across jurisdictions.