Belonging and Permanence: Outcomes in Long-Term Foster Care and Adoption

Abstract

Permanent placement in substitute families is one of the most drastic interventions that social workers ever engage in: social work's nearest equivalent to transplant surgery. No one, I hope, would attempt to justify transplant surgery unless there was a solid evidence base to support its use, but, in social work, there is widespread scepticism about the value and status of factual knowledge, to the point that the very idea that practice should be based on evidence is sometimes questioned and even scorned. I have always found this position hard to understand. If children and families are not to be at the mercy of the latest fad, whim, kneejerk response or fashionable magic bullet, then surely we have an obligation to find out what we can about whether or not our interventions are likely to have a happy outcome? In child placement, and in many other areas of social work in which interventions have huge implications for human lives, knowledge is not an optional extra, but ‘necessary for effective and just practice’ (Healy, 2008, p. 195).