Family Support as Reflective Practice

by Pat Dolan, John Canavan and John Pinkerton ( eds ) London : Jessica Kingsley , 2006 ISBN 1843103206 , 304 pp , £19.99 (pb ) This book is particularly, timely given that it combines core themes at the heart of contemporary childcare practice. The availability of appropriate support for vulnerable families is perhaps a matter for debate within the every child matters programme. In addition to this, attempts to describe and define the competent childcare professional are very much on the agenda in relation to workforce development and this book provides a good platform for discussion about reflective practice which, for many, is central to the profile of the skilled child and family practitioner. In the introduction to the book the editors make a good case for using social support theory, backed up by a set of practice principles, as the linchpin of family support theory, This is a helpful approach, providing a framework for understanding as well as the flexibility for development and growth. The 10 practice principles that they describe are ecological, child-centred, partnership orientated and solution focused and I felt had a lot in common with other partnership approaches, such as the signs of safety approach (Turnell and Edwards, 1999). The book is broken down into three parts. Part one explores policy and organisational issues, drawing on examples from the UK, Scandinavia, Ireland, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, and describes family support within the context of school, community and local government, as well as providing a comparison of the contexts in which family support has developed across four countries. In Section one, Illan Katz gives a succinct and thorough discussion of the role of schools in offering family support and the policy context within which recent developments have been made. In relation to extended and full service schools he highlights the fact that one size does not fit all and that choice and flexibility, a whole family approach and the engagement of schools staff will be key to the success of this initiative. Robert Chaskin gives a model of community-based practice and community capacity-building as an approach to supporting vulnerable and socially excluded families. He attempts to disentangle the complex influences of community functioning on family life and proposes a model for strengthening community capacity to support families, with ideas about how this model would impact on practice in different types of organisations. In the Danish case study of a local government approach to supporting parents (Jensen and Junker), I couldn't completely agree with the authors’ assertion that parents no longer serve as role models for their children or that there is no longer any such thing as a coherent family. I was interested though, in the way in which policy and practice had evolved through the route of risk identification and troubleshooting to an approach which, although still focused on risk rather than needs, starts from a base of helping parents to find the resources they possess or that exist in their own sphere to address children's difficulties, with the worker taking the role of a resource scout. Many similar themes examined in the Danish system have occurred in the UK in recent years: the relationship between normal and special systems (in the UK, read universal and targeted services), the need for earlier intervention and more integrated services and a recognition of the need to work from a strengths perspective to enhance resilient factors within the child, their family and the environment. I looked forward to the second part of the book, which focused on approaches to practice, and I enjoyed Ruth Gardner's description of reflective practice within National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children family support services and Jeff Fleischer and other's description of a youth advocacy programme which demonstrated a strengths-based model in action. Fatima Hussein provided some interesting challenges and proposals about how to develop culturally competent practice. Overall I was a little disappointed that nothing startlingly new or creative was described in any of the models, but perhaps the point is that we need to develop better approaches to articulate what we are doing and to reflect on its impact, rather than searching for novel approaches. I did feel that it was stretching a point to include some of the chapters in Section two as examples of reflective practice, as at times it seemed that it was in the writing of the chapter that the reflection was taking place, rather than in the practice itself. The final three chapters deal with evaluation; a subject which is at the heart of current debates about family support. I found Bruner's approach, using the theories of change outcomes approach to developing a model for evaluating family support refreshing, as it was not bound by the traditional measures of effectiveness and used an inclusive approach to agreeing on desirable outcomes which were embedded in the community. However, in chapter 16, Abraham and others make a robust case for using random control trials and for detailed analytical interpretation of data. I found myself undecided, as usual, as to which approach was preferable; presumably the answer being that there is room for both, depending on the circumstances.