The Development of British Children's Services

From Child Benefit to GCSEs, GP services to the care of elderly relatives, social policy impacts on our security, development and happiness. However, social policy also touches our lives in more unexpected ways…discipline within families and global economic competitiveness are all matters of social policy.
(Hill and Irving, 2009:1 )

The aim of this assignment is to analyse the development of British social policy, in relation to the development of children services. The author will explore the social policy responses to child protection from 1842 to 2011. This topic of social policy was chosen by the author because it is his area of social work he would like to practice in the future. In the beginning of the assignment the word will describe what social policy and child protection means in her/his own words linking it to other definitions. The essay author will analyse how child protection has develop looking at past legislation and how children’s deaths have influenced the way children services work today. Using different research the essay author will evaluate the benefits and challenges offered by inter-agency, inter-professional partnership working with children and families. In the conclusion, the authors will a brief description of what he/she have written.

Throughout this assignment a variety of terminology will be used, first it is appropriate to define what the term ‘Social Policy’ means. Social policy can be defined in different ways and ‘there is no established or agreed definition of social policy’ (Baldock et, al., 1999:21). From reading different books on social policy, the author’s understanding of social policy is it provides guidelines to deal with social problems . Social problems are matters which direct...

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...be seen gave the author a clear vision on how child protection has developed. Looking at the death of children and discussing them also gave some answers on how children services have developed over time over the years. In the evaluation the author discussed Tthe benefits and challenges offered by inter-agency and inter-professional partnership work have also been considered and it has emerged . By weighing the pros and cons of the author finds out that there is limited evidence on the outcomes for children and families. Even though a number of outcomes were discussed by Atkinson et al., their review provides evidence on the outcomes from professionals’ view point. Therefore, their review is not representative. Perhaps more study based on the outcomes or children and families will provide us a better understanding of on how effective inter-agency working really is.