Looking After Children: assessing outcomes in child care. The experience of implementation

A Department of Health initiative has supported the implementation of Looking After Children in over 90 per cent of local authorities in England. The process has required major organisational change and new values and attitudes towards children looked after away from home. Difficulties arise where management and monitoring systems are not available to support these wider changes and to assess the quality of practice. Nevertheless clear benefits to using the system can be identified. Pilot projects in Sweden, Canada and Australia provide an opportunity to compare experiences internationally; strong parallels are evident in some of the current issues facing child welfare.     

The Race for Education: Class,White Tone,and Desegregated Schooling in South Africa

In the early 1990s, privileged “white” South African public schools began to admit “black” pupils. Drawing on interviews, ethnography, and archival sources related to formerly‐white schools in Durban, this article addresses two main questions: first, why did white parents so enthusiastically vote for schooling desegregation when apartheid was still in place?; and second, why, over time, did intense competition emerge between schools, and become so focused on improving sports results? In addressing these questions this study takes an historical‐geographical approach, paying particular attention to two areas of Durban: the middle‐class central Berea area and the more working‐class areas in Durban's south. This story begins in the 1950s, a period of major schooling expansion and urban segregation, tracing how a hierarchy of white schools developed in relation to the city's uneven geographies of race and class. It is this schooling hierarchy and the way it became contested in the 1990s that is key to understanding the schools' shift from “cooperative desegregation” to “aggressive competition.” More broadly, the article argues that education provides a window into key post‐apartheid tensions – namely between the deracialization of privilege, the continued dividend of whiteness, and efforts to redistribute resources to the poor. Finally, in an age of mass education, it argues that the actions of schools play an important role in shaping raced and classed divisions in society.     

Now Being Social: The Barrier of Designing Outdoor Play Spaces for Disabled Children

The design of outdoor public play spaces such that disabled children can make use of them is set in the three constructs of play, childhood and disability, drawing upon academic learning, international policy and national policy in England. The suggestion is made that one of the main barriers to the adequate provision of such spaces is that providers and designers do not know how to design such spaces. The paper explores the knowledge which is available to overcome this barrier and which might lead to the provision and design of appropriate outdoor play spaces that disabled children can more fully use.     

Communication About Sexuality With Mothers and Stepmothers From the Perspective of Young Adult Daughters

Children can benefit when they are able to talk about sexuality with their parents. Studies indicate that adolescents prefer to discuss sexuality primarily with their same-sex peers and siblings. In families, teens prefer confiding in their mothers, then their fathers, and finally their stepparents of either gender. In an exploratory qualitative study, using a family systems and communication boundary perspective, 19 young women who self-identified as having a positive relationship with their mothers and nonresidential stepmothers were interviewed in depth. One area of strength identified was that the participants had open communication with their mothers. Although the volume of communication between mothers and daughters was greater than between stepmothers and stepdaughters, the content differed. Ten of the young women could confide in their stepmothers about their sexual experiences, whereas none of young women confided about sexuality with the mothers, with the exception of sexual health issues. This finding might indicate an unrecognized characteristic of positive stepmother–stepdaughter functioning. Practice implications are explored.