Child Welfare Inequalities in Wales: Practice and Prevention

End of project summary

Main messages

There is a significant body of research that demonstrates a strong relationship between poverty and child maltreatment and by extension, of being subject to child welfare interventions such as child protection procedures or being placed in out of home care. Consequently, families living in high deprivation neighbourhoods are significantly more likely to be involved with children’s services, compared with families in low deprivation neighbourhoods. In Wales, a child living in the most deprived neighbourhoods is almost 12 times more likely to be placed in out of home care than their peers in the least deprived neighbourhoods. Those living in the most deprived neighbourhoods in Wales are also more likely to be placed in out of home care than children living in equally deprived neighbourhoods in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. 

The overall aim of this study was to examine why there are differences across Wales in the rates at which children’s services intervene in families where there are care and protection concerns. The findings from this study augment those of the connected (Nuffield funded) Child Welfare Inequalities Project (CWIP) conducted in the four nations of the UK.  A mixed methods approach was used to drill down and examine the relationship between neighbourhood deprivation and social work practice. The hypothesis tested was that the observed inequalities in child welfare intervention rates represent a complex interaction of pre-existing structural inequalities, mediated through the situated activities of child welfare professionals, working within organisational structures and cultures informed by the interactions with, and responses of, families and communities. Fieldwork was undertaken in two Welsh local authorities. Comparisons were made both between these two and between selected districts and comparable sites in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland (from the CWIP study). Satellite sites were also identified to examine social work practice in the most and least deprived localities within each local authority. 

The study identified that whilst social workers were able to demonstrate theoretical understandings of the impacts of poverty on families, those understandings were not consistently visible in their day-to-day practice. Whilst it was acknowledged that poverty provided the backdrop to much of the social worker’s practice, there was also ‘othering’ taking place in relation to certain areas, communities, and families.  Social workers also felt that it was too late to tackle the difficulties associated with poverty as part of their professional role, articulating how it had become too entrenched within some families. Rather, they viewed poverty as something that needed to be dealt with at an earlier point in time, through different social care teams. There was a general lack of awareness amongst the social work teams about the kinds of resources available to families on a local level, which could support them with the challenges of poverty. Where there was knowledge of local services, support, and welfare benefits, it was often one person (a ‘guru’ or expert) who knew about them rather than it being a core part of social workers knowledge.