For the busy frontline practitioner with little time to plan ahead, this hands-on guide presents imaginative and unique methods to engage families and caregivers throughout the process of assessing vulnerable children. Setting the context for each area of assessment, including strengths and resilience, risk and needs and the child's lived experience, the book then describes a series of activities or creative techniques to engage young people and their caregivers within this area. It outlines the materials required, aims of the exercise and method. It includes 'handy hints' based upon practical experience, making it a quick go-to guide for every day practice. It encourages practitioners to focus on building safety into relationships and to adapt their approach to take into account the impact of trauma and abuse on an individual's capacity to engage and to communicate verbally.

As a practising social worker, you will need to be able to make sound judgments in complex contexts and when you are under pressure. This book covers the essential knowledge you will need to understand and develop skills in relation to professional judgement and decision making processes, including: - the use of assessment tools; - engagement in assessment and decision processes; - the context of risk, complexity and uncertainty in practice; - communication and management of risk within social care processes.

The diverse challenges that clinicians and children's workers tasked with safeguarding babies and young children face are complex, and this unique book looks at effective, practice-based and evidence-informed approaches to working across a wide range of issues. It outlines relevant theory and good practice, gathering case examples from around the world to illustrate what interventions look like in direct practice. Leading contributors address a wide range of challenges, including babies and very young children who have a serious illness, have complex diagnoses, or have been exposed to violence or adversity in early childhood. This is an essential guide for those who work to support and safeguard the welfare of babies and very young children, including professionals in health care, social work, mental health and child protection settings, as well as paediatricians, child psychologists and child psychiatrists.

This definitive textbook provides accessible information on best practice for assessing the needs and strengths of vulnerable children and their families. It explores the challenges that practitioners face routinely - with suggestions as to how to address them - as well as the established areas for assessment, of children's developmental needs, parenting ability and motivation, and socio-economic factors. This new edition has been extended substantially to include recent practice, policy and theoretical developments, such as understanding the lived experience of children, young people, and family members. It also considers children's neurological development, assessing parental capacity to change, early help assessments, emerging areas of practice such as child sexual exploitation, and working with asylum-seeking and trafficked children. Crucially, this updated edition takes a broader approach in offering relevant information to a range of professionals working with vulnerable children. The importance of inter-professional working is emphasised throughout.

Life story work allows care-experienced and adopted young people to understand their histories and come to terms with their feelings about the past. This accessible guide helps therapists and social care professionals to develop their skills to support children and families through their life story journey. It builds on the fundamental 6-step model for practice to incorporate elements from a variety of therapeutic approaches, from DDP to creative therapies. Theoretical explanations, case vignettes, and practical suggestions provide guidance on practice-based issues in life story work, such as working with parent/carer-child dyads, incorporating a birth family perspective, talking about traumatic stories, managing endings and constructing the life story book. Essential reading for anyone undertaking life story work, this guide enhances a time-tested model with up-to-date research and new ideas for overcoming the most common challenges practitioners face when delivering life story work.

This book helps adults to understand firesetting behaviour in children and teens and provides strategies to work with them to address the behaviour. Drawing upon the latest juvenile firesetting research and utilising child development theory to underpin its safety messages, the book explores why young people might set fires in the first place and contextualises firesetting in terms of communication and gaining the attention of carers and other adults. The chapters lay out practical, tried-and-tested steps that professionals and carers can take to address firesetting behaviour, and suggests how to further support any child or teen who sets fires. This includes summaries of the latest evidence-based support strategies and a range of creative activities that can be used in direct work with children and teenagers who set fires, tailored to specific age ranges. Combining expert advice on firesetting behaviour with straightforward practices, this comprehensive book can be used by anyone working with young people to help them intervene and prevent it.

Helping vulnerable children and young people to build protective behaviours is the key to keeping them safe. Full of creative ideas and activities, this guide provides the tools to help children develop these key skills. Topics include work around: building resilience and problem solving skills; identifying a 'safety network'; developing emotional literacy; awareness of grooming strategies and safe/unsafe touch; and cyber safety. The range of tried and tested techniques will be sure to engage any child in thinking about their personal safety, allowing adult carers to have confidence that their child will be empowered to better identify and avoid harmful situations and behaviours. Practical and easy to use, this is a valuable resource for professionals working with vulnerable children and young people, such as adopted or fostered children and those in residential care, as well as the parents and carers of these children.

A diverse range of practitioners, researchers and educators present a variety of perspectives on what counts as direct work. Is it the undertaking of certain tasks with a child, or building a relationship that matters most? Is it more about what is done with a child or about how it is done? Is it a set of planned activities or spontaneous approaches? And what counts as effective communication, given the diversity of both children and practice roles and contexts?

Life story work is one of the key therapeutic approaches to working with adopted or fostered children. While it sounds simple, there is much more to this work than producing photo albums or memory boxes for children. This accessible book is full of tried and tested activities and creative ideas for professionals, parents and carers who may have little time and few resources, but who need to carry out life story work that works for children. The authors describe the optimum conditions in which to carry out life story work and feature activities to accompany each of the necessary stages: creating a sense of safety, emotional literacy, building resilience, exploring identity, sharing information and looking to the future. This book will be a vital tool for social workers, foster carers, adopters, students and any frontline practitioners involved in working with traumatised children.

American public education has been on a merry-go-round of change for the past 40 years. We made something that is complex by its very nature into a strangled enterprise that is becoming even more knotty and complicated. A fog of reform is created obscuring issues and deflecting our focus from the real mission of schools. We need to emphasize ideals and principles in providing an education for our children in a caring and creative way. This book is about the fog of reform and getting back the ideal of a place called school. The sections describe a new metaphor and approach to change and examine the forces and ideals that can bring about the schools children need. Principles and values transform organizations, not mandates and fear. Recipes for making schools into caring places for children do not exist. Great schools must be created one-by-one. Numbers don't create change; people and passion do. Unless we focus on the moral imperative of educating children, we will fail them and possibly slide into an ethical quagmire.