Ebook: Social Work on Trial: The Colwell Inquiry and the State of Welfare

The UK's 1973 Colwell case represented a watershed in the way that personal social services were regarded in the welfare state era. This child death inquiry shaped a series of subsequent developments in different branches of child protection in the UK, such as: legislative (in the 1975 Children Act), administrative (establishing the public inquiry as the state's response to major scandals in social welfare), and professional (in the impact it produced upon the still-new Seebohm social services departments). Social Work on Trial documents, preserves, and critically examines this critical moment in the history of social work in the UK. Social Work on Trial is unique in its access to key players and transcripts of the public inquiry hearings just released at the National Archive. Contributing to organizational learning about child protection, the book draws on interviews with individuals who, more than 30 years after these events, are now well into retirement. The final chapter situates the Colwell case in contemporary social work, linking it to recent high profile cases such as (Baby) Peter Connolly and Victoria Climbie.