Towards a Human-Centred Participatory Approach to Child Social Care Recordkeeping

TY - JOUR

T1 - Towards a Human-Centred Participatory Approach to Child Social Care Recordkeeping

AU - Shepherd, Elizabeth

AU - Hoyle, Victoria

AU - Lomas, Elizabeth

AU - Flinn, Andrew

AU - Sexton, Anna

PY - 2020/4/15

Y1 - 2020/4/15

N2 - In 2019 there were over 75,000 children and young people in out-of-home care in England and Wales. Recent estimates suggest that up to half a million British people were in state or voluntary care as children, around 1% of the adult population. While individual experiences vary enormously by time and place, care-experienced people share in common the intensive documentation of their lives by social workers, educators, health professionals and associated practitioners. A complex, fragmented legislative and regulatory framework governs the creation and use of these records at the national level. Under UK law a ‘care file’ must be retained for at least seventy-five years, so that a substantial legacy of care data is held across the public, voluntary and private sectors. MIRRA: Memory – Identity – Rights in Records – Access, a participatory research project co-produced with care leavers, investigated recordkeeping practices in child social care from multiple perspectives. Interviews, focus groups and workshops with stakeholders identified critical failings in the creation, use, management and access of care records, which do not account for the needs and capabilities of multiple stakeholders. These failings have direct impact on the wellbeing and health of care-experienced people throughout their lives. MIRRA researchers developed a human-centred participatory recordkeeping approach to child social care, which this article describes. The approach combines the participatory continuum model (Rolan, 2017) and the capabilities approach to social work, rooting child social care recordkeeping in information rights principles.

AB - In 2019 there were over 75,000 children and young people in out-of-home care in England and Wales. Recent estimates suggest that up to half a million British people were in state or voluntary care as children, around 1% of the adult population. While individual experiences vary enormously by time and place, care-experienced people share in common the intensive documentation of their lives by social workers, educators, health professionals and associated practitioners. A complex, fragmented legislative and regulatory framework governs the creation and use of these records at the national level. Under UK law a ‘care file’ must be retained for at least seventy-five years, so that a substantial legacy of care data is held across the public, voluntary and private sectors. MIRRA: Memory – Identity – Rights in Records – Access, a participatory research project co-produced with care leavers, investigated recordkeeping practices in child social care from multiple perspectives. Interviews, focus groups and workshops with stakeholders identified critical failings in the creation, use, management and access of care records, which do not account for the needs and capabilities of multiple stakeholders. These failings have direct impact on the wellbeing and health of care-experienced people throughout their lives. MIRRA researchers developed a human-centred participatory recordkeeping approach to child social care, which this article describes. The approach combines the participatory continuum model (Rolan, 2017) and the capabilities approach to social work, rooting child social care recordkeeping in information rights principles.

KW - Access to records

KW - Care leaver

KW - Child social care records

KW - Data protection

KW - Information rights

KW - Recordkeeping

KW - Records Continuum

U2 - 10.1007/s10502-020-09338-9

DO - 10.1007/s10502-020-09338-9

M3 - Article

VL - 20

SP - 307

EP - 325

JO - Archival Science

JF - Archival Science

IS - 4

ER -