Children and COVID-19 Research Library

The COVID-19 pandemic changed dramatically the ways social workers engaged with children and families. This article presents findings from our research into the effects of COVID-19 on social work and child protection in England during the first nine months of the pandemic. Its aim is to provide new knowledge to enable realistic expectations of what it was possible for social workers to achieve and particularly the limits to child protection. Such perspective has become more important than ever due to knowledge of children who died tragically from abuse despite social work involvement during the pandemic.

Despite extensive reports during the COVID-19 pandemic of the academic challenges facing students, and the effects of online learning on academic achievements, we have little information regarding the needs and difficulties of K–12 students and their families from a social work perspective. The present article shares findings from a nationwide survey of 1,275 school social workers (SSWs) reporting on their clients—schools, children, and families—during the spring 2020 COVID-19 school closures. SSWs indicated that the children and families they served had significant unmet basic needs, including for food, healthcare, and housing. Poverty and mental health compounded pandemic difficulties, which were associated with the sociodemographic makeup of schools. Student engagement in social work services during the closures was significantly lower than prepandemic levels, generally due to unmet material needs. Several policy and practice implications arise from these findings, including a need for additional services for students and families, a plan to address structural inequities in our schools and communities, coordinated outreach to reengage missing students, and recognition of the strong work being done by school staff coupled with a need for additional supports and resources to combat persistent inequality.

Child welfare work is inherently difficult, and child welfare agencies are known to experience high rates of turnover. This study sought to expand the existing literature on intention to leave one’s child welfare agency and commitment to child welfare work through examining the coping mechanisms of frontline workers. Having and utilizing healthy coping mechanisms has proved beneficial to child welfare workers in previous research. This paper examined specific coping mechanisms identified in the Comprehensive Organizational Health Assessment and how they were associated with child welfare workers’ intent to leave their agency and their commitment to remain in the field of child welfare during the SARS CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic. Over 250 child welfare caseworkers were surveyed using the COHA instrument. Using both bivariate analysis and linear regression, specific coping mechanisms were identifyed, such as staying present with friends and family, as highly influential and discuss ways to strengthen these areas.

Children living with a parent with mental illness experience challenges as some may take on the roles of their parents. Physical distancing restrictions introduced because of the COVID-19 pandemic means that many children will spend more time at home which could heighten the impact of parental mental illness. For many of these children, engaging in activities with peers provides them a sort of normal life outside their family environment. However, face-to-face interactions with others outside the family may be limited under existing public health protocols. Moreover, services for children in families where there is parental mental illness may also be limited considering limitations placed on people’s movements to reduce the rate of COVID-19 infections.

This article analyses the concept of legitimacy as applied to the use of power in statutory social work with children and families in the UK. It draws on literature from police studies and criminology, in which the concept is a stable one that continues to be heavily researched and analysed. Police and social workers bear comparison in respect of legitimacy because of the significant powers they use on behalf of the state with direct implications for the civil and human rights of their fellow citizens. The article defines legitimacy in theoretical terms before applying the concept to social work. Here, perceptions of fairness in the distribution of resources, the quality of treatment people receive, and the quality of decision-making are critically examined. The article then proposes a democratising agenda across the three domains of social work research, policy, and practice.

The pandemic has served to further highlight the politics of care, making space for public debate about who is worthy of care, who cares, for whom, and under what conditions.This short commentary is about the definition of care and related public policies.