Introduction

This chapter uses the implementation of an innovative participatory approach to child welfare decision making in England and the US to consider the processes by which professionals and families can seemingly subvert or resist the intended outcomes of a new practice development. This is not to say that interplay between front-line professionals and families is the only place to look in order to explain the discrepancy between the intent of a policy and its outcomes. There is a body of literature that considers the challenges of implementing and managing innovation in public services, but not necessarily the impact of establishing new participative processes at the point of service delivery (Brown, 2007), which is the focus of this discussion. This focus is important because, despite being central to policy formulation in both countries since the mid 1990s, the practice of family engagement remains at best on the margins, with relatively few families having access to these family-led decision-making forums. We suggest the experience of introducing family decision making to be a complex process: professionals are argued to have sought to colonise the model so as to limit family power, and families to have reacted in turn against this process with their own resistance to the professional desire to control family decision making. It should be noted that this is not an exhaustive account of the evolution of family decision making in the UK and the US, rather this chapter is concerned only with particular dimensions of this development. We begin by setting out the history and context of the approach, necessary for understanding the subsequent tensions and difficulties. UK evaluations of local Family Group Conference services are used as illustrative material for the analysis, and the conclusion explores broader messages for innovative and radical social work practice development.

Overview of family group decision making models and history

Historically, in the UK and the US, individuals have been dislocated from their kinship networks in part by the fragmented state welfare services they access or receive (Morris et al, 2008). (While there are complex economic reasons for this separation, which are concerned with productivity and mobility, this is not the focus of this chapter and therefore not explored.)