Book Review: Assessment in Child Care: Using and developing frameworks for practice, Social Work Assessment and Intervention
| Published date | 01 April 2004 |
| Date | 01 April 2004 |
| Author | Christine Piper |
| DOI | 10.1177/147322540400400107 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Book Reviews
Martin Calder and Simon Hackett (Eds.), Assessment in Child Care: Using and
developing frameworks for practice, Russell House Publishing, Lyme Regis,
2003, £39.95 Pb, 1-903855-14-4.
Steven Walker and Chris Beckett, Social Work Assessment and Intervention,
Russell House Publishing, Lyme Regis, 2003, £17.45 Pb, 1-903855-34-9.
Reviewed by: Christine Piper, Reader, Law Department, Brunel University.
On the face of it, these two texts are irrelevant to youth justice. They focus on
assessment in relation to childcare and social work, with virtually no mention of youth
justice or children and young people who offend. The Calder and Hackett (C and H)
text is an edited collection in two parts, Part One (five chapters) analysing generally
the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families (DoH,
2000), and Part Two (16 chapters) dealing with assessment in specific areas such as
disability, parenting capacity, failure to thrive and illness fabrication, as well as
emotional and physical abuse. There are twenty-five contributors, including the editors,
coming from a wide range of disciplines such as social work, clinical and educational
psychology, paediatrics and social policy. They explore various issues in the application
of the Framework and aim to provide conceptual and practical tools for a range of
professionals undertaking assessments of children in need and their families.
The Walker and Beckett (W and B) text, which is targeted at student and qualified
social workers, discusses assessment and intervention as a linked process. It has nine
chapters in three parts (focusing on principles of assessment and intervention,
dilemmas in practice, and ‘synthesising practice’), with good sign-posting and useful
‘activities’in the form of questions for discussion followed by commentary. The
authors, lecturers in social work, hope to encourage ‘an integrated, holistic, modern
psycho-social practice rooted in principles of social justice and informed by the highest
level of ethical and evidence-based practice’(p4). The text covers social work with
children and a range of other clients, including the mentally ill and the elderly. It is in
Chapter 7 –Empowerment and Socially Inclusive Practice –where ‘young offenders’are to
be found as one of the six specific categories that are briefly discussed.
The back cover of the Calder and Hackett text lists Youth Offending Teams
amongst the wide range of workers at whom the text is targeted. It is a sad reflection
of the separate bureaucracies and professional cultures of the child protection and
youth justice systems that currently exist in England and Wales, however, that these
texts do not make more obvious their relevance to youth justice. These texts should
of course be relevant. Schedule 2 of the Children Act makes clear that section 17,
whereby a Local Authority (LA) has duties to children in need, enjoins the LA to take
steps ‘to reduce the need to bring . . . criminal proceedings against such children’(para.
7). The recent case brought by the Howard League
1
also confirmed that duties to
children in need, and duties to investigate the circumstances of children suspected of
suffering significant harm (section 47), do not stop at the gates of the Young Offender
Institution.
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