This paper addresses growing professional discontents with the increasing formalisation of social work practice exerted through systems of risk management and audit. Drawing on an ESRC-funded study of social work practices in children's statutory services, this paper provides a critique of instrumental approaches to risk management in social work. Through the discussion of three illustrative case examples, we argue that risk management is an inherently complex, contingent and negotiated activity. Social work practitioners are obliged to comply with risk reduction technologies, but informal processes continue to play a critical role in shaping decisions and actions in this relationship-based profession. From practitioner accounts, we identify key elements of the informal logics of risk management. We conclude that the bureaucratic–instrumental bias manifest in the modernisation of children's services, in privileging metrics and administrative power leaves the informal and relational aspects of practice under-emphasised and under-theorised. Suggestions are made about how practice might be advanced in the complex world of child welfare and protection.

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Risk, Instrumentalism and the Humane Project in Social Work: Identifying the Informal Logics of Risk Management in Children's Statutory Services

Information technology plays a pivotal role in New Labour’s modernization programme. Here we report findings from a 2 year ethnographic study of the impact and origin of one such system, the Integrated Children’s System, which has been deployed in statutory children’s social care. We show how the ICS, by attempting to micro-manage work through a rigid performance management regime, and a centrally prescribed practice model, has disrupted the professional task, engendering a range of unsafe practices and provoking a gathering storm of user resistance. We attribute these paradoxical outcomes to inherent flaws in the design of ICS, which derive from the history of its development and its embodiment of an audit-driven, inspectorial ideology. We conclude with some suggestions for user-centred design and policymaking, which have relevance not only for children’s social care but for the public services in general.

When policy o'erleaps itself: the tragic tale of the Integrated Children's System

Social work and risk have become increasingly linked, and contemporary social work has been significantly influenced by the risk paradigm. However, the concept of ‘risk’ in social work is by no means uniform or uncontested. This paper will review the varying rationalities of risk currently deployed in social work, and will contrast the differing policy responses and practices such differing rationalities of risk give rise to. Differing rationalities of risk constitute the social work subject differently, as ‘the rational actor’ or the ‘responsibilised’ user, although the extent to which subsequent practice responses actually differ is a moot point. Limits to the prudential actor are explored, for both users and practitioners, and the notion of situated rationality is offered as a more useful concept for understanding responses to risk in social work. In addition, risk rationalities are rarely translated into policy or practice in pure form; various ‘firewalls’ and barriers to transfer mediate such transference, and the paper will identify the most salient in contemporary policy.

Risk Rationalities in Contemporary Social Work Policy and Practice

In business and government, databases contain large quantities of digital transactional data (purchases made, services used, finances transferred, benefits received, licences acquired, borders crossed, tickets purchased). The data can be understood as ongoing and dynamic measurements of the activities and doings of people. In government, numerous database devices have been developed to connect such data across services to discover patterns and identify and evaluate the performance of individuals and populations. Under the UK’s New Labour government, the development of such devices was part of a broader policy known as ‘joined-up thinking and government’. Analyses of this policy have typically understood joining up as an operation of adding together distributed data about subjects, which can then be used in the service of government surveillance, the database state or informational capitalism. But rather than such technical or managerialist analytics, I argue that topological analytics capture what these database devices enact and do: they materialize the ‘individuality’ of subjects in intensified, distributed and fluctuating ways and materialize and intensify a logic of what Deleuze describes as modulating controls. Through examples of UK New Labour social policy initiatives over the past decade, I argue that topological analytics can account for these as immanent rather than exceptional properties of database devices and, as such, part and parcel of a governmental logic and ontology of subjects.

The governmental topologies of database devices

Over the last 40 years child protection systems in all Advanced Western Societies have been subject to high profile criticisms and regular major reviews. In many respects the Munro Review of Child Protection (2011) in England, is very different to those which have gone before. This paper summarises the main findings and recommendations of The Review and locates it in its immediate policy and practice contexts. The paper also begins to identify some of its possible gaps and challenges and argues that the success of The Review is likely to depend on cultural, political and economic factors well beyond its influence and outlines what these are.

The Munro Review of Child Protection: An Appraisal

We outline selected central results from a formative evaluation of four pilot sites in England and Wales of the Integrated Children’s System (ICS) – one part of the UK’s eGovernment strategy. We concentrate on the aspiration of the ICS towards ‘integration’ and ‘systematization’ of services within children’s services, at local and national levels. We look in turn at, the use of the ICS as a foundation for aggregate statistical profiles; the experience and views of the social workers; and the implications of ICS for social work practice as exemplified in social workers’ use of time. The evidence suggests substantial problems in accomplishing government policy aspirations in each of these areas. We review the likely reasons for these problems, and recommend a review of the ICS on the grounds that the difficulties are inherent rather than transitory, and have arisen at least in part from uncertainty as to whether the ICS is fit for purpose. The authors seek to promote the open and thoughtful debate that a major innovation of this nature requires.

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An exemplary scheme? An evaluation of the integrated children's system

Through the results from part of a formative evaluation in England and Wales of the Integrated Children's System, the authors aim to illustrate the diverse ways in which policy, technology and practice interests challenge conventional assumptions regarding the construction and use of evidence in children's services. We identify four connected consequences of the ICS for practice. The ICS actively shapes practice, brings issues into focus, renders social work visible and distances the services user. We interpret the findings in terms of the persistence and diversification of professional discretion and the interplay of standardisation and case‐based practice. We challenge some accepted academic understandings of the relationship between technology and professional practice.

Jasmine Clayden

Papers

An exemplary scheme? An evaluation of the integrated children's system

Technology, evidence and professional practice: reflections on the Integrated Children's System