Youth work and social care news from around the world

Posted on December 1, 2018 By Chris

Links from around the world of youth work and social care:

Care Leaver Covenant: Children’s and Families Minister Nadhim Zahawi has announced a scheme to raise the career aspirations and improve the life skills of care leavers. The Care Leaver Covenant has been signed by more than 50 businesses, charities and government departments in England who have committed to provide work based opportunities to young people leaving the care system. The scheme aims to create 10,000 work opportunities for care leavers over the next 10 years. For further information check out the Care Leaver Covenant website and see the pledges from government departments.
Online Safety: Childnet International has produced guidance for parents and carers on looking after the digital wellbeing of children and young people. This includes having an awareness of how being online can make children and young people feel, and how they can look after themselves and others when online. The guidance includes: age specific information about how children and young people are interacting with the internet; top tips to support young people at this age; and ideas to help start a conversation about digital wellbeing.
Loneliness Strategy: The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has published a strategy setting out the government’s approach to tackling loneliness in England – A connected society: a strategy for tackling loneliness – laying the foundations for change. The strategy refers to loneliness experienced by children and young people and states that the new subjects of relationships education for primary schools and relationships and sex education (RSE) for secondary schools, due to become compulsory in all schools in England in September 2020, will emphasise the value of social relationships. The guidance content for teachers will highlight the impact of loneliness, particularly on mental health.
Child trafficking: Europol has published a report on child trafficking in the European Union. Findings from a study of almost 600 intelligence contributions reported to Europol by member states between 2015 and 2017 include: traffickers active in the EU target underage victims mainly for sexual exploitation; the majority of non- EU networks reported to Europol involved Nigerian organised crime groups which traffic female children and women to be sexually exploited; trafficking and exploitation of male children, especially for sexual exploitation, remains an under-reported phenomenon at EU level.
Modern slavery: The Home Office has published an annual report on modern slavery in the UK giving an overview of modern slavery and how the UK has responded to it over the last 12 months. The report finds that 2,121 potential child victims of modern slavery were referred to the national referral mechanism (NRM) in 2017. The NRM is a victim identification and support process that is designed to make it easier for agencies involved in a trafficking case to cooperate, share information about potential victims and facilitate their access to advice, accommodation and support.
Knife Crime: The Guardian reports that figures obtained from nine of the NHS’s 11 regional major trauma centres in England that treat adults and children show that they dealt with 2,278 victims of serious knife crime in 2017-18, with cases involving under-18s increasing by 24.4% since 2015-16.
Kinship Care: Grandparents Plus has published a report looking at the challenges faced by kinship carers – grandparents and other family members – who have taken on the care of children who aren’t able to live with their parents. Findings from responses to a survey from 1,139 kinship carers across the UK show that the most common reasons for children living with respondents include: parental drug or alcohol misuse (51%), abuse and/or neglect (54%), a parent being unable to cope (39%), and domestic violence (31%). Carers also report that 54% of the children in their care have special needs, of which 85% have emotional or behavioural problems.

Youth work and social care news from around the world

Posted on September 29, 2018October 1, 2018 By Chris

Links from around the world of youth work and social care:

Strengths-based social care: The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) has published a report, written jointly with Leeds City Council and Shared Lives Plus, describing how strength-based approaches (SBAs) work in children and family settings and how effective they are. SBAs focus on the strengths as well as the needs of children, young people and their families. The report looks at: the key features of SBAs; embedding SBAs in practice; and avoiding pitfalls. SCIE has also published a series of blogs and a video in conjunction with the report, highlighting good examples of strengths-based social care for children, young people and their families.
Public health approach to tackle serious violence: The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has announced that a public health approach will be used to tackle serious violence in London. The approach, based on a similar initiative in Glasgow, will expand the work of the Mayor’s Knife Crime Strategy to include wider types of violence and look to address the links between violence in the home and on the street. It will aim to deliver early interventions to help prevent the spread of violence and improve coordination between the Metropolitan Police, local authorities, youth services, health services, criminal justice agencies and the Greater London Authority.
Girlguiding attitudes survey 2018: Girlguiding UK has published its annual report on the attitudes of girls for 2018 entitled ‘We see the big picture: girls’ attitudes survey’. 1,903 girls and young women aged 7-21-years-old took part in the survey from across the UK. The survey included questions about girls’ attitudes on a range of subjects, including: mental health; wellbeing and happiness; periods; education; relationships and socialising and safety. Findings include: 71% of girls knew another girl that had experienced mental health problems; 52% of girls have experienced harassment on the street, or know someone that has.
UK poverty metric: The Social Metrics Commission (SMC) has proposed a new metric for measuring poverty across the UK, outlined in their report on data for 2016/17. Findings include: 4.5 million children are living in poverty in the UK; overall child poverty has fallen by around 2% since 2001; the child poverty rate (32.6%) is higher than the poverty rate for the whole population (22%).
UK child welfare inequalities: The University of Huddersfield has published research, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, into child welfare intervention rates in each UK nation. Based on a mixed sampling of 12,412 children on protection plans or registers and 24,477 looked after children across the UK, research found that Northern Ireland has the lowest intervention rates, despite having the highest levels of deprivation.
Child criminal exploitation: The Home Office has published a new version of the county lines guidance relating to the criminal exploitation of children and vulnerable adults, for professionals across the UK who work with children. The new version includes a definition of child criminal exploitation, which is common in county lines, noting: it occurs where an individual or group takes advantage of an imbalance of power to coerce, control, manipulate or deceive a child or young person under the age of 18; it does not always involve physical contact and can also occur through the use of technology; and it is broader than just county lines, including children forced to work on cannabis farms or to commit theft.
Predicting child abuse: A series of articles in the Guardian report that local authorities in England are developing and using “predictive analytics” systems, where algorithms are used to identify families who may need attention from children’s services. The articles report that at least five local authorities have developed or implemented a predictive analytics system for child safeguarding (Thurrock; Brent and Essex; Bristol and Hackney.)
Update to Ofsted inspection framework for children’s services: Ofsted has updated guidance for inspections of local authority children’s services. Updates include: Ofsted will no longer use the single inspection framework to carry out re-inspections of local authorities rated inadequate, but will re-inspect using a standard inspection framework; and new guidance on producing an action plan for priority action areas after a focused visit. See the full ‘Framework, evaluation criteria and inspector guidance for the inspections of local authority children’s services‘ for more information.

Youth work and social care news from around the world

Posted on September 14, 2018September 23, 2018 By Chris

Links from around the world of youth work and social care:

Children’s access to healthy food: The Food Foundation has released a report analysing Public Health England’s (PHE) Eatwell guide, finding that 3.7 million children in the UK live in households for whom a healthy diet is increasingly unaffordable. Families earning less than £15,860 would need to spend 42% of after-housing income on food to meet the costs of the Government’s nutrition guidelines. The report calls for a national measurement of food insecurity in the UK.

Parental responsibility: guidance: The Department for Education has published guidance to help schools and local authorities in England understand and deal with issues relating to parental responsibility as recognised by education law, in particular in situations where parental responsibility can be confusing or unclear.

Young carers: Coram has published an evaluation of the Young carers in schools Programme, a free England-wide initiative delivered by Carers Trust and The Children’s Society aimed at improving the identification and support of young carers in schools. The published report, A better relationship with learning: an evaluation of the young carers in schools programme, involved an online survey of 103 schools involved in the programme, 14 interviews with schools and other stakeholders, and two focus groups with young carers. Findings include: the introduction of the programme resulted in the identification of an increased number of young carers; 85% of schools reported that young carers were demonstrating increased wellbeing; 83% reported increased happiness and 83% reported increased confidence.

Mental health policy in England: The House of Commons Library has published a briefing on mental health policy in England. The briefing includes reference to services for children and young people.

Children and young people’s mental health networks: UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has announced the creation of eight mental health networks to bring researchers, charities and other organisations together to address mental health research questions including: health inequalities for people with severe mental ill health; social isolation; youth and student mental health; and domestic and sexual violence.

In the service of youth – making waves in youth work: This year’s Institute for Youth Work conference is taking place in Brighton on the 10th November, it will be an opportunity to both celebrate Youth Work Week and the conference theme: coastal youth work. The conference is being co-hosted by the University of Brighton, and consequently one of the aims of the conference is to create a short paper on the unique nature of coastal youth work.

Suicide data from the UK and what does this mean for suicide prevention? The latest data shows that there were 5,821 suicides registered in 2017 in the UK, and the number and rate has decreased for the third year in the row. The decrease has mainly occurred in men, and the picture is different for women with the number of suicides remaining stable. However, men still account for three quarters of all suicides. Also, rates are not uniformly decreasing for all groups of men; rates in some age groups are increasing, for example men aged 45-49.

Working together to safeguard children: statutory guidance myth busting

Posted on August 13, 2018August 18, 2018 By Chris

The Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme has published guidance from the Department for Education (DfE) to clarify to relevant parts of the English statutory guidance Working Together to Safeguard Children 2018. They discovered that some parts of the guidance acted as a barrier to good practice and outcomes for children and families and can be made clearer, e.g. making it clear that family assessments of risk of harm faced by children are permissible as long as the unique needs of individual children are considered.

Topics covered include: individual child assessments; return home interviews; social workers for foster carers and children with long term foster placements; social workers for children in staying put; frequency of visits for social workers; and fostering and adoption panels.

The responses have been agreed by the Department for Education and their lawyers in consultation with Ofsted.

Youth work and social care news from around the world

Posted on August 11, 2018August 18, 2018 By Chris

Links from around the world of youth work and social care:

Young carers limited summer holidays: Action for Children and Carers Trust have released findings from a survey of 270 young carers under the age of 18 looking at how they spend their summer holidays. Findings show that: 47% of young carers spend more than four hours a day during the summer caring for a relative; 68% said they feel more stressed or worried during the holidays; and 57% worry about talking about what they did in the summer break when they go back to school.
“Holiday hunger” increasing: The National Education Union (NEU) has released findings from a survey of 657 secondary school teachers looking at “holiday hunger”, where families are unable to afford enough food during the school summer break. Findings show that 59% of members polled said that children and young people in their school experienced holiday hunger.
Relationships and sex education and PSHE briefing papers: The House of Commons Library has published a briefing on relationships and sex education and a briefing on personal, social, health and economic education (PSHE) in schools in England. The first briefing provides an overview of the legislation and guidance currently in place regarding sex and relationship education (SRE) in schools and related reviews and proposals in Parliament to introduce relationship and sex education (RSE), whilst the second sets out the rules relating to the provision of (PSHE), and introduces the debates about the quality of provision and the subject’s statutory status.
Online abuse and the experience of disabled people: The House of Commons Petitions Committee has published draft recommendations and launched an inquiry into online abuse and the experience of disabled people. Recommendations include: making incitement of disability hatred a specific crime; and requiring social media companies to produce easy to read privacy notices. The inquiry follows a petition organised by Katie Price, mother of a 16 year old son with disabilities who was subject to online abuse, which was signed by more than 200,000 people.
UK children with ADHD wait up to two years for diagnosis: The Guardian reports that analysis of a freedom of information request by the All-party parliamentary group on ADHD shows that children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are waiting up to two years for a diagnosis in England.
Digital literacy: The House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee has published an interim report following its disinformation and fake news enquiry. The report includes a section looking at digital literacy in relation to children and young people. Its recommendations include: introducing digital literacy as part of the physical, social, health and economic curriculum funded by an educational levy to be raised by social media companies.