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© British Association of Social Workers

Looking After Children: a New Approach or just an Exercise in Formfilling? A Response to Knight and Caveney

SONIA JACKSON

Sonia Jackson is Professor of Applied Social Studies at the University of Wales Swansea. She was a member of the Department of Health Working Party on Outcomes in Child Care from which the Looking After Children project sprang, and later contributed to the development of the Assessment and Action Records through a series of trials and revisions. She was responsible for the training pack and video that formed part of the complete package of materials published by the Department of Health in May 1995. She no longer has a formal connection with the project but continues to take an interest in its progress and the use of the Records both for practice and research purposes.

Correspondence to Sonia Jackson, Department of Social Policy and Applied Social Studies, University of Wales Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP email s.jackson{at}swansea.ac.uk

Summary

Assessment and Action Records, a key component of the widely adopted Looking After Children system, have been criticized by Knight and Caveney (1998) for imposing white middle class assumptions about child development, for undermining the Children Act principle of partnership, and for blaming individuals instead of structural factors for shortcomings in care and poor outcomes. This response welcomes a critical scrutiny of the Looking After Children model, but argues that these particular criticisms are based on a misunderstanding of the system and a classbound view of parenting which would deny looked after children the chance of a better quality of adult life than their families experience. Implementing Looking After Children is not an alternative to addressing the pervasive inequality and discrimination in our society (Jackson and Kilroe, 1996), but using the Assessment and Action Records makes it more likely that social workers and carers will pay attention to important aspects of children's development and be able to see more clearly how what they do or do not do relates to the outcome for the child.


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