Julie Taylor - Collaborative Practice with Vulnerable Children and Their Families

Julie Taylor

Professor of Child Protection School of Health and Population Science University of Birmingham

June Thonurn

Emeritus Professor of Social Work University of East Anglia

Series Editors

H,ugh Barr and Marion Helme Centre for the Advancement of Interprofessional Education

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Collaborative Practice with Vulnerable Children and Their Families is being published at a very opportune time. The issues it addresses are increasingly important for a growing number of agencies and professionals whose work brings them into contact with children, young people and their families. For some years it has been recognised that it is no longer appropriate for those working in the broad health, welfare and criminal justice fields to see and carry out their work in professional compartments and silos. Since the 1970s official reports and guidance has stressed the importance of professionals working together to identify and prevent cases of actual or potential child abuse, particularly in relation to the sharing of information and, increasingly, responsibility. However, no longer is this seen as an issue only where there are concerns about child abuse - the need for collaboration is seen as equally important if help and support is to be made available at a much earlier stage. Concerns about intervening with vulnerable children, young people and their families are now seen as of considerable political and policy significance. However, quite what this means and how it should be carried out in practice is a much greater challenge.

Julie Taylor and June Thoburn attempt to address this challenge - or rather challenges - head on. They choose their words carefully as they recognise the language used, as well as the practices and organisational arrangements the language is meant to represent, is very slippery and open to wide interpretation and misunderstanding. Collaboration helpfully provides something of an umbrella term to cover the many ways that professionals, agencies, volunteers and families can and do work together, while the term vulnerable is understood in terms of children and young people who are actually or potentially experiencing cumulative harm in terms of more than one adversity and hence would benefit from some additional, targeted services. In many respects for the latter to be successful requires the former, in a variety of forms, to be evident.

Throughout, the book is written in a very accessible style and will be of considerable interest and use to a diverse range of practitioners, managers and trainers working in a variety of settings. It discusses the relevant mandates, statutes, guidance and organisational contexts for such work together with the relevant research and knowledge base which informs it. The book stresses the importance of the value base for working collaboratively with vulnerable children and families, and throughout provides a series of quite different case vignettes and exercises which can be carried out either individually or in groups. These act to really bring the text to life and help the reader to make links with practice in such a way which does not underestimate the complexities and challenges with such work. Importantly, it clearly identifies the key features of what good collaborative working entails.

It is also clear that the policy environment is making the need for such work even more central. It isnt simply that there is an expectation that professionals should become involved earlier and hence prevent problems from getting worse but that the complexity of the work is itself growing. Not only are new types and dimensions of childrens vulnerability being discovered all the time but the range and types of agencies operating in the field are themselves becoming more diverse, fluid and, argu- ably, fragmented. The growth of the private sector, social enterprise agencies and the general move to a culture of service commissioning and specialisation, as well as the exponential growth in the use of various forms of information technology, means that the need for, and expectations regarding, collaboration have increased in recent years. It is in this context that this book is timely and to be very much welcomed. It promises to be of value for some time to come.