The educational experiences and attainment of looked-after children and young people (LACYP) remains an issue of widespread international concern. Within the UK, children and young people in care achieve poorer educational outcomes compared to individuals not in care. Despite proliferation of research documenting the reasons for educational disadvantage amongst this population, there remains limited empirical consideration of the lived experiences of the educational system, as perceived by LACYP themselves. This paper draws upon qualitative research with 67 care-experienced children and young people in Wales. The sample was aged 6-27 years, and comprised 27 females and 40 males. Participants had experienced a range of care placements. Findings focus on how educational policies and practices alienate LACYP from dominant discourses of educational achievement through assignment of the 'supported' subject position, where children and young people are permitted and even encouraged not to succeed academically due to their complex and disrupted home circumstances. However, such diminished expectations are rejected by LACYP, who want to be pushed and challenged in the realisation of their potential. The paper argues that more differentiated understandings of LACYP's aspirations and capabilities need to be embedded into everyday practices, to ensure that effective educational support systems are developed.

A key issue for the social work profession concerns the nature, quality and content of communicative encounters with children and families. This article introduces some findings from a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) that took place across the United Kingdom between 2013 and 2015, which explored how social workers communicate with children in their everyday practice.The Talking and Listening to Children (TLC) project had three phases: the first was ethnographic, involving observations of social workers in their workplace and during visits; the second used video-stimulated recall with a small number of children and their social workers; and the third developed online materials to support social workers. This paper discusses findings from the first phase. It highlights a diverse picture regarding the context and content of communicative processes; it is argued that attention to contextual issues is as important as focusing on individual practitioners' behaviours and outlines a model for so doing.

This paper reports findings from a qualitative research inquiry into child sexual exploitation (CSE) involving young people with experiences of CSE. The paper considers how 'care'-understood as an act, an orientation and/or set of relations (including statutory responsibilities at the level of the local state)-featured as a recurrent theme across the data in respect of the ways in which participants made sense of the problem of CSE, why they were vulnerable and at risk, and the ways in which people should respond to such risks. Findings suggest that young people who are without care and recognition from protective adults, and who are not permitted as active agents in setting the terms of their own support, are vulnerable to CSE. Not only do adult care-giving and practices of child protection feature in participants' accounts as being part of the problem, but they suggest that the instigation of these practices, made as a response to CSE, can ignore and serve to compound that which they are attempting to prevent and disrupt. There is an urgent need for care responses to address the complex underlying issues behind CSE, and to open up the possibility of interventions beyond narrow child protection responses.

Reports into incidents of child death and serious injury have highlighted consistently concern about the capacity of social workers to communicate skilfully with children. Drawing on data collected as part of an Economic and Social Research Council funded UK-wide research project exploring social workers' communicative practices with children, this paper explores how approaches informed by social pedagogy can assist social workers in connecting and communicating with with children. The qualitative research included data generated from 82 observations of social workers' everyday encounters with children. Social pedagogical concepts of ‘haltung’ (attitude), ‘head, heart and hands’ and ‘the common third’ are outlined as potentially helpful approaches for facilitating the intimacies of inter-personal connections and enhancing social workers' capacity to establish and sustain meaningful communication and relationships with children in the face of austere social, political and organisational contexts. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Lt

Andrews (2019) Enabling talk and reframing messages: working creatively with care experienced children and young people to recount and re-represent their everyday experiences,

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A growing awareness of child sexual exploitation (CSE) in the United Kingdom and throughout the world has prompted human service and legal/policy professionals to seek ways of engaging young people experiencing sexual exploitation, although much remains unknown regarding effective practice, and whether or not current knowledge regarding best practices with young people can be expanded to address CSE. This paper considers how principles of harm reduction, a public health approach widely used to engage adults and young people in help-seeking behaviours, can be considered as part of a children's rightscentred approach to policy and practice with young people experiencing CSE.

This article examines children's agency in their interactions with social workers during statutory encounters in a child protection context. It draws from a UK wide ethnographic study. It finds that much of social workers' responses to children's agency in this context are best understood as a form of 'containment'. In doing so, it offers an original and significant contribution to the theoretical understanding of children's agency, as well as its application in social work practice.