Direct Work with Family Groups is full of great ideas to aid engagement, assessment and enable positive change through direct work with family groups. Working with families can be a challenging experience. This book looks at the personal skills needed to engage families, both at home and in the community. It provides guidance on how to assess and manage the needs of individual family members, whilst also being mindful of potential risk factors. With easy to use activities and resources, this book will inspire you to think about creative new ways to plan and carry out your work. Based on tried and tested techniques, this is a must-have for social workers and social work students, as well as child protection workers, therapists, counsellors and child and family centre workers. It is the perfect complement to Direct Work with Vulnerable Children, also by the same authors.

The ability to build a trusting relationship is essential when working with vulnerable children. Through the use of numerous engaging games and activities developed over 20 years of working with abused and neglected children, this book shows how these lines of communication can be opened up through effective engagement with the child's world.

This ebook reports on the unprecedented and radical step taken by Warwickshire Social Services Department when, in 1986, it closed the last of its children's homes. This book examines the background to these developments, the reasons for them and their consequences. The findings are set in the context of the crisis of confidence in residential child care that occurred in the early 1990's culminating in the Pindown Report on Staffordshire which revealed an alarming catalogue of inhuman and degrading treatment of children in residential care. This research, undertaken by NCB, reports findings that have major national and international significance. The future role of children's homes is in question and this study examines whether foster care, in particular, is more effective at meeting children's needs than residential care. Young people's own views are included and the work is presented very much in the context of the Children Act 1989.

This new practice text provides a series of readings focusing on case management in a number of fields and in a variety of settings with different client populations. Each chapter examines a major component of case management practice by presenting information about an innovative program from a different location around the country. In conjunction, these readings provide a road map to social work case management.In addition to offering up-to-date practice approaches and examining the functions and skills of case management in depth, the authors provide the policy information needed for putting this traditional form of social work practice into today's service delivery context.