Child welfare inequalities: new evidence, further questions

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Bywaters, P., Brady, G. ORCID: 0000-0002-3431-6543, Sparks, T. and Bos, E., 2016. Child welfare inequalities: new evidence, further questions. Child and Family Social Work, 21 (3), pp. 369-380. ISSN 1356-7500

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/cfs.12154

Abstract

Research internationally has identified large differences in rate of child safeguarding interventions, recently characterised as child welfare inequalities, markers of social inequalities in childhood with parallels to inequalities in health and education. This paper reports a Nuffield Foundation funded study to examine the role of deprivation in explaining differences in key children's services interventions between and within Local Authorities (LAs). The study involved an analysis of descriptive data on over 10% of children on child protection plans or in out-of-home care in 14 English LA's at 31 March 2012. The data demonstrate very large inequalities in rates of child welfare interventions within and between LA's, systematically related to levels of deprivation. There is evidence of a gradient in child welfare inequalities across the whole of society. There also appears to be an equivalent of the inverse care law for health: for any given level of deprivation in local neighbourhoods, LAs with lower overall levels of deprivation were intervening more often. The findings raise fundamental questions for research, policy and practice including whether the allocation of children's service resources sufficiently recognise the impact of deprivation on demand and how we judge whether a safeguarding system is effective at the population level

Item Type:

Journal article

Publication Title:

Child and Family Social Work

Creators:

Bywaters, P., Brady, G., Sparks, T. and Bos, E.

Publisher:

Wiley

Date:

August 2016

Volume:

Number: