Research Library

England’s children’s social care workforce is in a state of crisis, with the problem perhaps more prominent in the field of child protection. This study explored the impact of social work qualification route on early career social workers’ sense of preparedness for child protection practice.

This study aimed to explore how depressed adolescents talk about their self-harm behaviours and their self-harm scars during therapy for depression. The findings of this study suggest that it could be helpful for therapists to consider how wider sociocultural beliefs around self-harm may impact how teenagers talk about their self-harm and scars in treatment for depression.

The Lighthouse Parenting Programme (LPP) is a multifamily mentalization-based intervention for parents with child protection service involvement. The Supporting Parents Project was a randomized controlled trial of the LPP being delivered by children’s social care services.

This paper reviews and summarizes the research on parental mentalizing using the Parent Development Interview and the Reflective Functioning coding. It also describes the future developments for the measure.

Brief review of the neuroscientific findings that illuminate whether and how adverse early caregiving experiences impact on brain development and poor socioemotional outcomes in children in care, and how such evidence informs our understanding of attachment outcomes in this population.

Despite recent investments in school-based mental health and wellbeing promotion in England, the sustainability of mental health interventions remains a substantial challenge. This article brings together potential solutions to sustaining interventions in schools, drawing on insights from an online roundtable discussion held in July 2022. 

We searched for studies investigating whole-family-interventions for families living with parental mental illness. We identified what these interventions have in common, their effectiveness and how families' experienced them.

Level Up is a novel, UK-based intervention consisting of five online group sessions, straddling the summer holidays, and providing at-risk children and their parents/carers with skills to manage their behaviour, emotions, and relationships to support their transition to secondary school. A prior evaluation of Level Up reported a need to better describe the mechanisms of change. This study therefore evaluated the experiences of children and their parents/carers regarding the facilitators and barriers to engagement and change, and the perceived impact.

When given identical information, mental health professionals were less likely to diagnose a child in care (vs. a child not in care) with PTSD. Related to this lesser detection of PTSD, mental health professionals were also less likely to choose NICE-recommended PTSD treatments for a child in care.