Introduction

Comparative welfare research now acknowledges that social services, as well as social security systems, define welfare states (Bambra, 2005; Jensen, 2008). In the child welfare field, cross-national studies offer critical insight into the goals, priorities and logic of welfare systems; differences in institutional structures and boundaries; and differences in the roles and characteristics of professionals, managers and service users in contemporary welfare states (Hearn et al, 2004; Hetherington, 2005). Interview methodologies enrich these approaches, linking stakeholder preoccupations and perspectives to cross-national analyses of system priorities and design (Hetherington, 2005).

This chapter draws on interview data from three study countries to map the strategic challenges confronting child welfare systems and to explore differences in the responses of these systems to the common challenges. Data were collected in Australia, England and Sweden as part of a bigger project seeking to understand the links between the characteristics of the workforce in child welfare services and the quality of service outcomes. The premises of the broader study were as follows. First, social services such as child welfare are primarily constituted by interpersonal interaction. Second, and following from the first, the characteristics of the workforce and the organisational contexts that shape and constrain their practice will be critical determinants of the quality of services for users. The three countries were chosen because two – England and Australia – have historically shared a common approach to child protection, focusing on targeted intervention to prevent abuse and neglect in an otherwise weakly developed system of public supports for parents and children characteristic of liberal welfare states. In both countries, however, there has been much reform activity in the child welfare sector in recent years, with many initiatives aimed at early intervention and gesturing towards more universal support for families. The third – Sweden – offers a useful contrast because child welfare services are embedded in a more universalistic system of support for parents and children, characteristic of social democratic welfare states.

The findings contribute to understanding the difficulties facing child welfare systems of different types – and give some insight into why reform is hard to achieve. Interviews with participants in child welfare systems (in this chapter, senior and local managers and policy workers, as well as researchers) provide some insight into the day-to-day experience of structural features of those systems.