Core groups and partnership: three models and a case study

This chapter discusses the development of partnership approaches in post-registration child protection work. It focuses on few models of partnership in order to analyse a case study of work in core groups. Partnership is an ambiguous and yet popular and readily accepted concept. Current developments of partnership in core groups have been largely driven in practice by social workers and other front-line workers who have for some time advocated that parents/carers and children be included to a greater or lesser extent in the discussion and/or decision making in post-registration work. A number of researchers have also identified benefits of partnership for parents/carers, children and the practitioners themselves. Government encouragement in the direction of partnership and the benefits claimed by researchers do not, of course, mean that the process of developing partnerships is straightforward or easy to achieve. The models discussed under this heading emphasise decision making as a central locus of ‘participation’.