Re-imagining Social Work is delighted to welcome this guest contribution to our blog by Stephen Crossley who blogs in England about the Troubled Families Programme, looking at how the key workers (or ‘troubleshooters’ as David Cameron has called them) are enacting the troubled families agenda and if/how they are negotiating it and/or resisting it. You can read more about his work here. Stephen is undertaking a PhD in the School of Applied Social Sciences, Durham University and is interested in how some families are constituted as a threat to society.
A briefing paper by Mike O’Brien ….”The government has signalled that its main approach to child poverty is to concentrate on a small subset of poor children who live in ‘complex’ families with multiple needs. By contrast, the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) believes that a comprehensive preventative approach is needed, not one that concentrates on responding to the worst outcomes of child poverty and deprivation and then only once these conditions have become patently obvious with families living in cars or casualties of our health and welfare systems that they can no longer be ignored”.
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Native Affairs on the CYF review
Ann Tolley demonstrates an utter failure to grasp indigenous issues whist being interviewed by Mihingarangi Forbes on Native Affairs.
This guest blog post is by Peter Matthewson. Peter is a lecturer in the Department of Social Practice at Unitec. He has previously worked as a social worker in the former Department of Social Welfare, in the Probation Service, and in mental health.
The ‘Expert Panel’ tasked, in obscure corporate-speak, with producing ‘a programme level business case’ for modernising Child Youth and Family is clearly driven by a political agenda, and a predetermined message is likely to be delivered to Anne Tolley. Further, the terms of reference presented to the ‘Expert Panel’ suggest a thinly disguised attack on our profession.
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Questions for the Minister
Questions from Jacinda Ardern MP to the Minister for Social Development. We’ll publish the answers on the blog when they arrive.