Children’s services ‘fail to support children of disabled parents’

Children’s social care services risk unnecessarily separating children from disabled parents through misunderstanding their conditions and weak joint working with adult services, research has claimed. A study of disabled parents who had all been referred, or self-referred, to children’s social care, found support offered by the services did not aim to support parents to care for their own children, but rather provided substitute care that separated families. Parents told researchers from the Tilda Goldberg Centre for Social Work and Social Care at the University of Bedfordshire, and the charity Ginger Giraffe, that during family assessments children’s services social workers did not seek to understand the family’s needs, and instead focused on risks and incapacities associated with the parents’ conditions. Read more.