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Schools, Child Welfare and Well-being: Dimensions of Collective Responsibility for Maltreated Children Living at Home

Year: 2012
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This qualitative study examines collective responsibility for the well-being of maltreated children who remain at home. Based on accounts of mothers, teachers and child welfare workers, and policy officials, the study uses institutional ethnography to examine how schools and child welfare authorities work together and with families. Contributing to the socio-legal literature, it explores understandings of responsibility in formal law and in practice. \nThe policy response to these children’s needs raises significant theoretical and political issues because they are on the borderlands of public and private responsibility. Child welfare involvement signals public intervention is required to ensure protection and well-being. Strong, proactive, and coordinated support by public authorities should follow. However, data suggest three pervasive theoretical or political accounts legitimize very limited support. \n(1)\tThe notion of home and school as separate spheres. Participants understand and in theory support the highly prescriptive regulation governing reporting and contact between schools and CAS. But in practice participants pointed to limits on responsibility for knowledge or communication across the boundaries. Participants acknowledged limited knowledge or communication despite a regulatory regime that promotes and assumes it.\n(2)\tComprehensive family responsibility. Deeply-rooted notions of family responsibility and autonomy render public support for struggling families and children relatively discretionary. A policy and practice scan shows child welfare provides less educational support to children living in the community relative to those in foster care, and minimal individual or systemic accountability for services to these children.\n(3)\tPersistent heroic narratives of the teacher who ‘makes a difference’ through exceptional commitment to struggling students. To relegate caring work to realm of personal commitment privatizes responsibility for an important aspect of effective teaching. Though cited as exemplary, the exercise of these responsibilities is not supported, not demanded, and not planned for, which is problematic for interagency co-operation and teacher burnout. \nThese political and institutional narratives limit the system’s response to the needs of these vulnerable children to discretion and chance. Meeting their needs requires not only a focus on coordination across bureaucratic boundaries, but also strengthening the visibility of, and accountability for, issues of well-being within education and child welfare.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2733293331
Cites: 102
Cited by: 2
Related to: 10