SOCIAL WORKERS RELATION TO LOOK AFTER CHILDREN

Social Workers Relation to Look After Children



Social Workers Relation to Look After Children

Introduction

This paper is based around the social work interventions with children leaving care. I have chosen this topic as I am interested in adoption and fostering and the life story work which is done with children in the care system. From my research into this topic that I have selected it has fuelled my passion for this topic even more. It is important for social work because the child's allocated social worker does a lot of work with the child; getting them ready to leave their foster homes, either into an adoption placement or when they get old enough to move out into their own home. This paper discusses to what extent social workers are able to influence attainment of the five Every Child Matters outcomes in relation to Looked After Children

Analysis

The social workers do work with them around leaving and what their new family is like. They also do some of the life story work with them and their foster parents. Children find the life story work useful as it looks at where they have come from and where they are going, it looks at all the families they have stayed with and the homes they have lived in. The social work role is also important as many children that leave the care system end up homeless. And the aim of the social worker is to try and give them a better start to their adult life and to try and prevent them needing further social work intervention when they have left the care system.

The main points I am going to be focusing on and discussing are children in the education system that are leaving care and the implications it has on the children, social work and life story work, children leaving the care system that have a disability, the relationships children have with their social workers when in the care system, and the main outcomes of children leaving the care system. I will also be looking at the relevant laws and legislation that are in place for children leaving the care system.

Children Education System Looked After

Cairns and Stanway start off by looking at what looked after children have in common, one of the main similarities was that they are likely to underachieve in school; they gained statistics form the department of health national statistics drawn from OC2 Returns (Cairns And Stanway, 2007, pp 12-190). They showed that looked after children do consistently worse in primary and secondary education than their peers and far less progress to further or higher education. They discussed that even taking into account their prior history before coming into care they seemed to be additionally disadvantaged for being looked after. They go on to explain why it is more difficult for looked after children to manage school life; they adapted many reasons for this including the fact that they may experience many moves not ...