Mapping Child-Care Social Work in the Final Years of the Twentieth Century: A Critical Response to the 'Looking After Children' System

This paper explores aspects of the Looking After Children: Good Parenting: Good Outcomes system (LAC) (Parker et at., 1991). It is suggested that the scheme, to be used with children and young people who are ‘looked after’ by local authorities, needs to be subjected to greater critical scrutiny. The paper seeks, therefore, to situate the LAC system in a social and political context and highlights how it also relates to the dominant operational modalities of social work intervention in the late 1990s. In addition, the paper explores how ‘troublesome’ children and ideas centred on ‘parenting’ feature in the LAC discourse. The discussion concludes with an examination of Action and Assessment Records (Ward, 1995b), the centrepiece of the LAC system.