Paul Bywaters
Biographic Data
| ID | 3562240 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Bywaters |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul |
| FAMILY NAME | Bywaters |
| SIGNATURE | BYWATERS P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Coventry University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6375-6222 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 519 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Fathers' mental Ill-health and child maltreatment
Austerity, Poverty, and Children’s Services Quality in England
In England, the dominant policy narrative recognises no association between spending on children’s services and quality and a limited association between quality and deprivation. We combined 374 inspection outcomes between 2011 and 2019 with data on preventative and safeguarding expenditure and Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) scores. A multilevel logistic regression model predicting ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ judgements suggests each £100 incr…
The differential association of socioeconomic vulnerabilities and neglect-related child protection involvement across geographies
Housing, Homelessness and Children’s Social Care
Having a secure, safe and affordable home is an essential element in the experience of a ‘good enough’ childhood. This is not available to a large and growing number of children and parents in the UK because of a structural housing crisis affecting the availability, quality, affordability and regulation of accommodation. There is a clear body of evidence which demonstrates the negative effects of poor housing and homelessness on children’s health…
The ‘toxic trio’ (domestic violence, substance misuse and mental ill-health)
Income inequality and child welfare interventions in England and Wales
Background Previous research has identified a relationship between income inequality and child abuse and neglect in the USA. This association has received limited exploration outside the USA. Methods Administrative data on child protection (CP) in 172 English and Welsh local authorities between 2013 and 2018 were combined with data on deprivation, ethnic density and education from publicly available data sources. Commercial income data were used …
Beyond the Toxic Trio
Demand for children’s social care is often conflated with rates of intervention and associated with a limited constellation of parental risk factors. This article reports on a more comprehensive picture of demand obtained through a quantitative study of child welfare interventions in England. Longitudinal child-level data were combined from children’s social care services in six English local authorities over a four-year period (2015–2018). Laten…
Understanding out of Home Care Rates in Northern Ireland
Research exploring inequalities in UK child welfare interventions has produced counter-intuitive findings with respect to Northern Ireland (NI). Despite experiencing the highest levels of deprivation, NI also displays the lowest rates of children in care of all the UK nations. With reference to wider evidence in the field of child welfare inequalities, this article details the findings of two exploratory mixed methods case studies, located within…
Child welfare inequalities in the four nations of the UK
Comparative international data on patterns of inequality in child welfare interventions, for example, the proportion of children about whom there are substantiated child protection concerns or who are in out-of-home care, are far less developed than data about inequalities in health. Few countries collect reliable, comprehensive information and definitions, methods of data collection and analysis are rarely consistent. The four UK countries (Engl…
Exploring drivers of demand for child protection services in an English local authority
This paper reports on an empirical study of child protection services in a local authority where rates of investigations and interventions rose to unprecedented levels during the course of a single year. The aim of the research was to explore explanations for this rise in demand among the providers of children's social care in the area. Using an interpretative qualitative design, a series of focus groups and interviews were carried out with pract…
Untangling child welfare inequalities and the ‘Inverse Intervention Law’ in England
Born into care
Cuts both ways
Screen, Ration and Churn
This article presents findings from a quantitative study of the national data-sets for statutory children’s social care services in England. The aim of the study was to examine how demand management varied in local authorities with differing levels of area deprivation. About 152 local authorities census returns and other statistical indicators covering the period 2014–2017 were combined into a single data-set. Statistical analysis was undertaken …
Toward Full Integration of Quantitative and Qualitative Methods in Case Study Research
Delineation of the full integration of quantitative and qualitative methods throughout all stages of multisite mixed methods case study projects remains a gap in the methodological literature. This article offers advances to the field of mixed methods by detailing the application and integration of mixed methods throughout all stages of one such project; a study of child welfare inequalities. By offering a critical discussion of site selection an…
Paradoxical evidence on ethnic inequities in child welfare
Poverty, inequality, child abuse and neglect
A Four-Nation Comparison of Kinship Care in the UK
The practice of extended family and friends helping to care for children when their parents are unable to is an enduring tradition in many cultures. Kinship care provides the largest proportion of out of home care in Western society but many of these carers experience poverty and deprivation, and do not receive comparable levels of support, financial or professional, to other placement types. This study provides UK evidence for the relationship b…
Social work, poverty, and child welfare interventions
The relationship between children's material circumstances and child abuse and neglect raises a series of questions for policy, practice, and practitioners. Children and families in poverty are significantly more likely to be the subject of state intervention. This article, based on a unique mixed‐methods study of social work interventions and the influence of poverty, highlights a narrative from practitioners that argues that, as many poor famil…
Looking After Children in the UK—Convergence or Divergence
Comparative child welfare administrative data from each of the four jurisdictions of the UK (Scotland, England, Northern Ireland (NI) and Wales) were analysed over a ten-year period to examine rates and patterns of public care. Scotland followed by Wales has the highest rates of children in out-of-home care, followed by England and NI with similar lower proportions. Despite strong links between deprivation and higher chances of becoming looked af…
Trends in Child Protection Across the UK
Although numerous international studies point to large variations in child welfare interventions, comparative analysis has tended to focus either solely on England or the UK as a whole, discounting differences across the four UK countries. This paper compares trends in national statistics relating to the operation of child protection systems across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland between 2004/05 and 2013/14. Despite a number of legi…
Austerity, rationing and inequity
This article investigates local authority (LA) trends in expenditure on Children’s and Young Peoples’ services in England between 2010 and 2015, a period of government characterised by measures of fiscal austerity. We draw on a rationing framework to contextualise the levels and trends in expenditure under observation. The article analyses trends in various groupings of expenditure, using a latent growth modelling approach to identify significant…
Child protection in England
Purpose In the past 40 years, both health policy and educational policy in England have adopted commitments to reducing socially created inequalities. However, an inequalities perspective has only begun to emerge in relation to child protection, and child welfare services more widely. The purpose of this paper is to chart evidence of these green shoots of a new policy direction which focusses on two aspects: equalising service provision and outco…
Inequalities in English child protection practice under austerity
The role that area deprivation, family poverty, and austerity policies play in the demand for and supply of children's services has been a contested issue in England in recent years. These relationships have begun to be explored through the concept of inequalities in child welfare, in parallel to the established fields of inequalities in education and health. This article focuses on the relationship between economic inequality and out‐of‐home car…
Child Welfare as Justice
This theoretical paper addresses fundamental questions raised by a four-nation comparison of child welfare interventions in the UK, the Child Welfare Inequalities Project, which has highlighted differences between and within countries. The project analysed administrative data to examine the relationship between deprivation and state intervention. This project builds on research by Coventry University which established both a social gradient in ch…
Inequalities in English child protection practice under austerity
The role that area deprivation, family poverty, and austerity policies play in the demand for and supply of children's services has been a contested issue in England in recent years. These relationships have begun to be explored through the concept of inequalities in child welfare, in parallel to the established fields of inequalities in education and health. This article focuses on the relationship between economic inequality and out‐of‐home car…
Social work, poverty, and child welfare interventions
The relationship between children's material circumstances and child abuse and neglect raises a series of questions for policy, practice, and practitioners. Children and families in poverty are significantly more likely to be the subject of state intervention. This article, based on a unique mixed‐methods study of social work interventions and the influence of poverty, highlights a narrative from practitioners that argues that, as many poor famil…
Austerity, rationing and inequity
This article investigates local authority (LA) trends in expenditure on Children’s and Young Peoples’ services in England between 2010 and 2015, a period of government characterised by measures of fiscal austerity. We draw on a rationing framework to contextualise the levels and trends in expenditure under observation. The article analyses trends in various groupings of expenditure, using a latent growth modelling approach to identify significant…
Exploring inequities in child welfare and child protection services
Inequalities in child welfare intervention rates
Child welfare systems internationally exhibit very large inequalities in a variety of dimensions of practice, for example, in rates of child protection plans or registrations and out‐of‐home care. Previous research in the midlands region of E ngland (Bywaters; Bywaters et al .) has detailed key aspects of the relationship between levels of neighbourhood deprivation and intervention rates. This paper reports further evidence from the study examini…
Child welfare inequalities
Research internationally has identified large differences in rates of child safeguarding interventions, recently characterized as child welfare inequalities, markers of social inequalities in childhood with parallels to inequalities in health and education. This paper reports a Nuffield Foundation‐funded study to examine the role of deprivation in explaining differences in key children's services interventions between and within local authorities…
Inequalities in Child Welfare
Over many years, large differences have been observed between local authorities (LAs) in England in the proportion of children who are ‘looked after’ out of home, or the subjects of child protection plans, with deprivation being identified as the major explanatory factor. This article proposes that such differences be reconceptualised as ‘child welfare inequalities’ and suggests that drawing parallels with health inequalities would have value in …
Disadvantage and Discrimination Compounded
This paper discusses a qualitative and quantitative study of the circumstances of 20 Pakistani and Bangladeshi families with one or more severely disabled children living in Birmingham, England. Parents and other adult carers were interviewed using a combination of structured questionnaires and a semi-structured interview schedule focusing on the families' material circumstances, their use of formal services, informal care arrangements, and aspec…
Untangling child welfare inequalities and the ‘Inverse Intervention Law’ in England
Paradoxical evidence on ethnic inequities in child welfare
Poverty, inequality, child abuse and neglect
Exploring drivers of demand for child protection services in an English local authority
This paper reports on an empirical study of child protection services in a local authority where rates of investigations and interventions rose to unprecedented levels during the course of a single year. The aim of the research was to explore explanations for this rise in demand among the providers of children's social care in the area. Using an interpretative qualitative design, a series of focus groups and interviews were carried out with pract…
Cuts both ways
Child Welfare as Justice
This theoretical paper addresses fundamental questions raised by a four-nation comparison of child welfare interventions in the UK, the Child Welfare Inequalities Project, which has highlighted differences between and within countries. The project analysed administrative data to examine the relationship between deprivation and state intervention. This project builds on research by Coventry University which established both a social gradient in ch…
Born into care
Attitudes towards disability amongst Pakistani and Bangladeshi parents of disabled children in the UK
It has sometimes been assumed that religiously based explanations for and attitudes to having a disabled child have led to the low uptake of health and social services by ethnic minority families in the UK. A series of semi-structured interviews were held between 1999 and 2001 with 19 Pakistani and Bangladeshi families with a disabled child as part of an evaluation of an advocacy service. The families' understandings of the causes of their child'…
A Four-Nation Comparison of Kinship Care in the UK
The practice of extended family and friends helping to care for children when their parents are unable to is an enduring tradition in many cultures. Kinship care provides the largest proportion of out of home care in Western society but many of these carers experience poverty and deprivation, and do not receive comparable levels of support, financial or professional, to other placement types. This study provides UK evidence for the relationship b…
Trends in Child Protection Across the UK
Although numerous international studies point to large variations in child welfare interventions, comparative analysis has tended to focus either solely on England or the UK as a whole, discounting differences across the four UK countries. This paper compares trends in national statistics relating to the operation of child protection systems across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland between 2004/05 and 2013/14. Despite a number of legi…
The ‘toxic trio’ (domestic violence, substance misuse and mental ill-health)
Beyond the Toxic Trio
Demand for children’s social care is often conflated with rates of intervention and associated with a limited constellation of parental risk factors. This article reports on a more comprehensive picture of demand obtained through a quantitative study of child welfare interventions in England. Longitudinal child-level data were combined from children’s social care services in six English local authorities over a four-year period (2015–2018). Laten…
Looking After Children in the UK—Convergence or Divergence
Comparative child welfare administrative data from each of the four jurisdictions of the UK (Scotland, England, Northern Ireland (NI) and Wales) were analysed over a ten-year period to examine rates and patterns of public care. Scotland followed by Wales has the highest rates of children in out-of-home care, followed by England and NI with similar lower proportions. Despite strong links between deprivation and higher chances of becoming looked af…
Learning from Experience
This article discusses the development of a strategy for securing a step change in social work research in higher education in the UK. This project, undertaken by the Joint University Council Social Work Education Committee (SWEC), aimed to give direction to the constituency, address complex and potentially conflictual issues across the four countries of the UK and promote social work research both internally and to external stakeholders. The obs…
Working it out for ourselves
Austerity, Poverty, and Children’s Services Quality in England
In England, the dominant policy narrative recognises no association between spending on children’s services and quality and a limited association between quality and deprivation. We combined 374 inspection outcomes between 2011 and 2019 with data on preventative and safeguarding expenditure and Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) scores. A multilevel logistic regression model predicting ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ judgements suggests each £100 incr…
Screen, Ration and Churn
This article presents findings from a quantitative study of the national data-sets for statutory children’s social care services in England. The aim of the study was to examine how demand management varied in local authorities with differing levels of area deprivation. About 152 local authorities census returns and other statistical indicators covering the period 2014–2017 were combined into a single data-set. Statistical analysis was undertaken …
Social work - health work
The implications of a series of Social Services Inspectorate reports on social services for hospital patients are critically discussed. These reports emphasise the strengths of hospital based social work, but also reveal continuing uncertainty about the contribution which social work can make to address the personal and social causes and consequences of illhealth. The reluctance of the Government to acknowledge inequality as a key determinant of …
Assessing older people's health
The new community care arrangements have focused attention on assessment and on the responsibilities of health and social services. This article asks what contribution social workers can make to the assessment of older people’s health based on social science knowledge, to complement health professionals whose knowledge base centres on the natural sciences. A critical appraisal of recent evidence about health concepts, health choices, the social c…
Government, Social Services Departments and the Health of Children and Young People
Despite the dearth of research into the health of children and young people in contact with or ‘looked after’ by local authorities, a series of official and quasi-official reports have begun to raise awareness of this issue. There are good reasons to believe that this group of children will be disadvantaged in terms of health as they are in other aspects of their lives. The evidence suggests that local authorities do not live up to the standards …
Supporting carers
Informal carers are central to the community care policies which have emerged during the last two decades. However, research has suggested that caring is a gendered activity, disproportionately expected of women with consequent disadvantage in terms of physical and mental health and material well-being. Moreover, evidence has been presented that, in the past, women carers were less likely to be offered the support of public services than their ma…
Working it out for ourselves
Tackling Inequalities in Physical Health
We argue that tackling the impact of social inequality on physical health should become a central objective of social work and intrinsic to the development of anti-oppressive practice. This is on three grounds. First, the suffering embodied in inequality in physical health should be a cause of concern to social workers, as a pervasive social problem. Secondly, awareness of social work's complicity in contributing to such a problem, through its hi…
Social Work and Health Inequalities
Journal Article SOCIAL WORK AND HEALTH INEQUALITIES Get access Paul Bywaters Paul Bywaters Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Social Work, Volume 29, Issue 5, October 1999, Pages 811–816, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/29.5.811 Published: 01 October 1999
Critical commentary. Talking about inequality
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Disability, Ethnicity and Childhood
Whilst there is an increasing body of literature on the perspectives of carers of disabled children, there is little research giving the disabled child's perspective from either majority or minority populations. Indeed, the voices of black and Asian children in disability research have been almost silent. This literature review collates and analyses existing knowledge about the perceptions held by disabled and non-disabled children, and young peo…
The Impact of New Labour Health Policy on Social Services
The health policies of the Labour Government of 1997-2001 included an increased emphasis on social services departments' (SSDs) contribution to promoting health. Three dimensions of this policy shift are discussed: first, the drive towards organisational fusion between elements of the NHS and SSDs; second, the new mechanisms for conjoint funding of health and social services; and, finally, the new policy focus on tackling health inequalities by c…
Disadvantage and Discrimination Compounded
This paper discusses a qualitative and quantitative study of the circumstances of 20 Pakistani and Bangladeshi families with one or more severely disabled children living in Birmingham, England. Parents and other adult carers were interviewed using a combination of structured questionnaires and a semi-structured interview schedule focusing on the families' material circumstances, their use of formal services, informal care arrangements, and aspec…
Attitudes towards disability amongst Pakistani and Bangladeshi parents of disabled children in the UK
It has sometimes been assumed that religiously based explanations for and attitudes to having a disabled child have led to the low uptake of health and social services by ethnic minority families in the UK. A series of semi-structured interviews were held between 1999 and 2001 with 19 Pakistani and Bangladeshi families with a disabled child as part of an evaluation of an advocacy service. The families' understandings of the causes of their child'…
Empowerment and advocacy
The concepts of empowerment and advocacy, and how they impinge on power relationships for service providers working with black and Asian communities, are explored through the findings of a 20-month project carried out between 2000 and 2001 with 19 Pakistani and Bangladeshi families who have children with severe disabilities in Birmingham. This action research project evaluated an advocacy project designed to improve the quality of life for Pakist…
Learning from Experience
This article discusses the development of a strategy for securing a step change in social work research in higher education in the UK. This project, undertaken by the Joint University Council Social Work Education Committee (SWEC), aimed to give direction to the constituency, address complex and potentially conflictual issues across the four countries of the UK and promote social work research both internally and to external stakeholders. The obs…
Tackling Inequalities in Health
This paper presents arguments for recognizing and tackling health inequalities as a major new challenge for social work. Four underpinning points provide the building blocks for this case, that health inequalities are a matter of social justice and human rights, that the causes of health inequalities are primarily social, that poverty and poor health are common characteristics of social work service users and, that, therefore, health inequalities…
For the Sake of their Health
Facilitating older service users’ requirements for access to or re-engagement in social networks following hospital discharge is recognized in social care analysis and policy as critically important. This is because of the associated benefits for restoring physical health and psychological well-being. However, it tends to be a neglected dimension of current social care/intermediate care. Our paper draws on a qualitative study of voluntary sector …
Revising social work's international policy statement on health
English This article presents the new IFSW policy statement on health. In addition to describing the consultation process undertaken, it identifies the core content and background analysis informing it. Issues raised include the relationship between local practices of social work and processes of globalization. Implications for future social work policy development are discussed. French Cet article présente la nouvelle déclaration de politique de…
Good intentions, increased inequities
Addressing the quality of services provided in Emergency Departments (EDs) has been a central area of development for UK government policy since 1997. Amongst other aspects of this concern has been the recognition that EDs constitute a critical boundary between the community and the hospital and a key point for the identification of social care needs. Consequently, EDs have become the focus for a variety of service developments which combine the …
Social Work, Health and Equality
Child welfare inequalities
Research internationally has identified large differences in rates of child safeguarding interventions, recently characterized as child welfare inequalities, markers of social inequalities in childhood with parallels to inequalities in health and education. This paper reports a Nuffield Foundation‐funded study to examine the role of deprivation in explaining differences in key children's services interventions between and within local authorities…
Inequalities in child welfare intervention rates
Child welfare systems internationally exhibit very large inequalities in a variety of dimensions of practice, for example, in rates of child protection plans or registrations and out‐of‐home care. Previous research in the midlands region of E ngland (Bywaters; Bywaters et al .) has detailed key aspects of the relationship between levels of neighbourhood deprivation and intervention rates. This paper reports further evidence from the study examini…
Cumulative jeopardy? A response to Brown and Ward
Exploring inequities in child welfare and child protection services
Inequalities in Child Welfare
Over many years, large differences have been observed between local authorities (LAs) in England in the proportion of children who are ‘looked after’ out of home, or the subjects of child protection plans, with deprivation being identified as the major explanatory factor. This article proposes that such differences be reconceptualised as ‘child welfare inequalities’ and suggests that drawing parallels with health inequalities would have value in …
Poverty, child abuse and neglect
This article examines recent data on the costs of poverty, child abuse and neglect (CAN), paying particular attention to contemporary patterns of spending in England. The discussion explores the ‘reactive’ spending necessary to deal with the short/medium term consequences of poverty and CAN and the ‘preventative’ spending associated with some interpretations of early intervention The evidence outlined suggests that the financial costs of poverty …
Political science (42 works) · Sociology (36 works) · Psychology (31 works) · Medicine (29 works) · Law (26 works) · Homelessness and Social Issues (25 works) · Economics (24 works) · Child Abuse and Trauma (22 works) · Economic growth (22 works) · Inequality (22 works)