This study examines how Norwegian child welfare managers balance children’s right to family life and reunification goals with the need for stability in temporary foster placements. It finds that legal frameworks can both support and constrain professional decision-making, creating tensions around family contact, reunification, and children’s need for secure, permanent relationships.

This study examines how child protection workers in Estonia interpret and implement children’s participation rights in foster care placement decisions, revealing tensions between rights-based ideals and legal, professional, relational, and institutional constraints. While workers generally supported hearing children’s views, participation often remained procedural and conditional, highlighting the need to address structural and practice-based barriers to ensure meaningful participation in child welfare systems.

This report, based on 131 in-depth interviews co-produced with peer researchers who have lived experience of the justice system, finds widespread mistrust of the family and criminal justice systems and highlights how negative interactions can shape expectations of fairness and access to justice in the U.K.. Participants also reported that court experiences caused additional harm, including deterioration in mental health, while delays, limited resources and inadequate legal support left many feeling powerless and, in some cases, pressured to plead guilty.

This research report reviews international approaches to competency frameworks and in-service training for the social service workforce, drawing on experiences from the United Kingdom, Romania, Germany, France, Sweden, Poland, and other countries.

This technical brief examines how the meaningful participation of children and young people with lived experience (PWLE) in alternative care can strengthen child protection systems, improve service quality, and influence policy reform. It presents international examples from Ireland, Scotland, the United Kingdom, Moldova, Kenya, Romania, Albania, and the United States, illustrating how children and care leavers contribute to individual case planning, service design, regulatory monitoring, advocacy, and national care reform.

This case study examines the supervision system for the social work workforce in the United Kingdom, highlighting governance arrangements, professional standards, implementation practices, and lessons relevant to strengthening supervision in Ukraine. The publication describes supervision as a legally mandated and reflective practice embedded within employer accountability systems and professional development, rather than solely a performance management mechanism.

This mixed-methods systematic review reports findings from 73 studies on interventions to support children and young people to return home safely after a period in care in the UK. Overall, reunification interventions had a small but meaningful positive effect on outcomes associated with successful reunification.

This chapter compares kinship care policies and practices across five high-income countries—the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, and South Korea—examining how different welfare and governance systems support children placed with extended family. It highlights growing prioritization of kinship care over institutional care while emphasizing differences in state support, regulation, and reliance on informal family networks.

This report, from the UK All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Kinship Care, shines a spotlight on the experiences of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) who are raised by kinship carers. The report reveals that both the child welfare system and the SEND system were not designed with kinship families in mind.

This systematic scoping review examines programmes that integrate parenting support and financial well-being support for families with children aged 0–19 in the UK. It explores programme models, evaluation approaches, and evidence on their effectiveness in addressing child and family outcomes.