The Travelling Idea of Looking After Children: Conditions for moulding a systematic approach in child welfare into three national contexts—Australia, Canada and Sweden

Abstract

Looking After Children (LAC) is an approach (care philosophy and working tools) used to assess the psycho-social development of children being cared for by child welfare agencies. It is an international initiative that was developed in England and then travelled and was translated into other contexts, most notably Australia, Canada and Sweden. This paper presents findings from an open-ended question in a survey distributed to social workers and managers using LAC and “cousin” systems in these countries. We asked respondents what advice they would give to others considering implementing these systems. Our qualitative content analyses showed that, regardless of the context, the 257 respondents gave voice to programmatic/normative arguments, reflecting mainly positive attitudes to the systems. However, managers and social workers voiced different arguments in their favour. Managers voiced normative arguments favouring the underlying principles, whereas social workers from all three countries identified the dual needs to remain flexible and to recognise the limitations of the systems, especially at the operational level. Results offer insights into approaches to change management in different contexts.

Keywords:

• Implementation
• Social Workers
• Translation
• Standardised Tools
• Procedurialisation
• Viewpoints

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Swedish Research Council for Working Life and Social Research for funding and to all social workers, supervisors and managers for their willingness to share their experiences.

Notes

¹Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research. Project: 2003–0110

²LACES is an electronic version of LAC developed and distributed by Barnardos, Australia.