Building the Working Alliance Based on Confidence That Can Be Earned
Why a working alliance has to be built on confidence, not trust — and what Peter Connelly's case still teaches about caseload as a safeguarding variable, not a budget line.
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Disguised Compliance: The Confidence Measure's Hardest Case
What happens when a family performs cooperation fluently while nothing changes behind it, and the four markers that catch it when a single home visit can’t.
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Capacity on Both Sides of the Door
Why capacity, not intention, governs whether a stalled case moves — on both sides of the door, from an overwhelmed caseworker to a parent whose depression, not willingness, is what’s missing.
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Who Decided the Child Was Grown?
No society has had a single moment at which a child becomes grown — work and household, marriage, the body, and public declaration each set a different threshold, differently for girls and boys, rich and poor. From Blackstone's ladders and the 1842 mines to Roman puberty and Japanese rites, and who answered when a threshold was set wrongly.
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How the Law Moved the Line
United Kingdom law has no single age of childhood — criminal responsibility, marriage, the vote, work, schooling and tobacco each have their own age limit, and each moved at its own time, from the 1842 Mines Act to the Tobacco and Vapes Act 2026, with the inquiry, campaign or disaster that came before each change.
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The Moralising of Poverty
From a 1994 murder case to the 2026 breakfast clubs debate — why structural poverty keeps getting mistaken for individual moral failing, and what that costs a family.
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Race and the Licensing of Discourse
Why speaking about racism in general has become abundant in Britain while naming it in one specific safeguarding case has stayed almost unlicensed — the same finding, confirmed three times in twenty-two years.
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Self-Imposed Enclosure: When a Community's Boundary Fails Safeguarding
From the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ two-witness rule to the Church of England’s handling of John Smyth — the same structural mechanism, documented across communities with almost nothing else in common.
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More Responsibility, Less Training: How Safeguarding Moved Down the Ladder
A decade and a half of frontline safeguarding judgement moving from qualified social workers to a wider, less-trained workforce tier — examined as a training gap, a risk gap, and an accountability gap, not as a simple case of standards slipping.
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What the UK Doesn't Know About the Cost of Keeping Children Safe
UNISON's solo-visits survey, HSE and insurance data, and international comparators from the Netherlands, Norway, and the US, all tested for what they actually show — and fail to show — about the risk and cost of frontline safeguarding work.
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The Orientation of Fresh Social Work Students
What social work students are really being taught in their first assignments — not niceness, but the discipline of testing lived experience against evidence before it's safe to use on someone else's family.
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AI and Higher Education
Generative AI has broken the university's oldest assessment proxy — the fluent essay as evidence of underpinning knowledge. What replaces it: process-based assessment, degree apprenticeships, and the reverse obligation on industry.
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After Munro. Who is listening now?
The government's reform and Eileen Munro's own critique of it both claim the evidence — but neither side asks whether the conference room itself, whoever chairs it, does what either assumes.
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The Case of the Missing Hours: A Columbo Investigation
What professional curiosity actually looks like — and what gets missed when practitioners settle for the obvious explanation.
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The Epistemology of Safeguarding
What we know, how we know it, and why it matters. The philosophical foundations of professional decision-making.
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Children's Own Words in the Record
Who wrote down what a child said, and what was left out? Joan of Arc's trial, an eight-year-old mine worker's evidence, Anne Frank's diary and a medieval birch-bark letter show the routes by which a child's words reach the record — a clerk, a family, the child's own hand, a later editor — and what they are worth once they arrive.
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Counting a Child's Age
An age depends on a calendar, a record and someone willing to believe it. How a child's age has been counted, claimed and proved — from the Laws of Manu to Mozart's London notices and Victorian registers — and what happened when the count was disputed.
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Living in a Fabricated World
Reality, illusion, and Spock’s wisdom on certainty — why the confident assessment is always the one to question hardest.
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Navigating Truth and Deception
Student conduct and safeguarding — what professional curiosity requires when accounts don’t stack up.
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When Abstraction Is Out of Reach
How limited early experience shapes thinking — and what it looks like when a client genuinely cannot think ahead.
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From Zebras to Ravens
A safeguarding typology for young people who cannot be contained — and what the research says about each position.
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The Zealots Among Us
When passionate certainty impedes what it seeks to protect — the organisational cost of ideology in practice.
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Social Work Delivered Through Local Government
A social work degree prepares students for the job. It rarely prepares them for the institution that job is delivered inside — from the fobs and mandatory training on day one to why decisions so often get made on cost first.
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Sure Start: What Was Promised, What Was Measured, and When It Was Known
The Sure Start evaluations and funding decisions set side by side on a timeline: what the programme promised, what each evaluation measured, and when each outcome could first be known.
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Examining the Evaluators: Why Are They Listened To?
The WAVE Trust, the Sutton Trust, the Nuffield Foundation and the University of East Anglia: what each is, how it is paid for, what stands behind it and who checks it.
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