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The article analyses the findings of a small-scale qualitative study in Ireland that examines interactions between asylum-seeking mothers and primary school teachers, and highlights the significance of teachers' understandings of asylum in shaping home-school communications. Mothers and children in this study were living in Direct Provision, collective accommodation for asylum seekers in Ireland. The research identifies a number of concerns including: poor communication between the school and mothers, only English being used as a medium of communication with the mothers, and mothers being directly and indirectly excluded from Parent Associations. Interactions of teachers with asylum-seeker mothers demonstrated a lack of recognition that their situation is different from other migrants/newcomers and is particularly challenging because of the because of living in Direct Provision and under the threat of deportation. The research shows that primary schools are drawn into ambiguous relationships with asylum-seeking mothers in their attempts at advocacy and surveillance, as they are expected to facilitate integration, while at the same time dealing with the uncertainty facing asylum-seeking parents and children.

This article compares social work in countries representing four different welfare regimes: Chile, the Republic of Ireland (refer to elsewhere as 'Ireland'), Lithuania and Sweden. The aim is to examine how social workers in different contexts refer to families' complex needs, how contextual factors influence social workers' positions and actions, and how they make sense of their work. Social workers in 15 focus groups, 4 per country except for Chile with 3, were interviewed about their conceptions of 'family', 'families with complex needs', and reasoning about interventions in relation to a fictitious complex case vignette. The understanding of complex needs appears relatively individualized in Chile and Lithuania, while contextual factors were more pronounced in the Irish and Swedish material. Chile, exemplifying a familialized family policy regime, reflects a poverty-compensatory social worker role that also supports familial reproduction; Ireland, a partly defamilialized regime, reflects a supportive and risk-reactive role; Lithuania, a refamilialized regime reflects a patriarchal risk-reducing role and Sweden, a defamilialized policy regime, reflects a rights-oriented and technocratic role. Welfare regimes shape different social work practice contexts. However, to some extent, social workers around the world share a common work ethos in how they, for the best interest of the people they work with, deal with the cross-pressure from social problems and political-ideological priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitudes of students in social work taken from a longitudinal study of students from around the world indicate that male and female social work students have the same ethical values. This contradicts work by Carol Gilligan who suggested that male and female social workers have different ethical values.

Issues concerning social work are discussed with emphasis on the situation in Ireland. The influence of the media especially on the topic of child abuse is described and suggestions for the future role of social work in the country are presented.

This article explores ways in which gender equality, family policy and child welfare social work intersect in four countries: England, Ireland, Norway and Sweden. Over time, conditions for gender equality in parenting have improved, partly due to family policy developments removing structural barriers. These changes, however, vary between countries; Sweden and Norway are considered more progressive as compared with the UK and Ireland. Here, we draw on focus group data collected from child welfare social workers in England, Ireland, Norway and Sweden to compare these different contextual changes and how these are reflected in related social work practice decisions. The focus group discussions were based on a vignette, and thematic analysis was applied. Overall, welfare social workers are aware of the need to support gender equality in parenting, there is a heavy focus on mothers in child welfare practice decisions, and fathers are largely absent. Uniquely, we show that this is influenced by both a strong child-centred perspective, and a gendered risk perspective, in which fathers are seen to pose more risk to the children than mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The retention of social workers in child protection and welfare is an ongoing concern in many countries. While our knowledge based on the turnover of child protection and welfare social workers is growing, much less is known about 'stayers'—those who undertake this work for over 10+ years. This article draws on the data gathered over a decade in Ireland on these social workers. The article addresses three questions: (i) What can we learn from social workers with 10+ years' experience of child protection and welfare about their retention? (ii) Does job embeddedness theory help explain their choices to stay? (iii) Does the 'career preference typology' (Burns, 2011. British Journal of Social Work , 41(3), pp. 520–38) helps to explain social workers' retention? The main findings are that if you can retain social workers beyond the 5-year point, their retention narrative intensifies, their embeddedness in the organisation and community strengthens and they have a stronger sense of professional confidence as they move out of the early professional stage. A surprising finding of this study was that nearly all of the social workers in this study had a staying narrative that changed little between their interviews a decade apart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]