Partnership working between young carers project and social services
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1921/swssr.v16i3.534Keywords:
<i>partnership working</i>, <i>young carers</i>, <i>professions</i>, <i>child protection</i>Abstract
This article draws on in-depth qualitative interviews with ten practitioners who specialise in working with young carers, to examine how members of the emerging profession of ‘young carers’ worker’ view their partnerships with social services. It focuses particularly on one case study area (Town Z), where partnerships between social services and the voluntary sector around young carers were relatively highly developed. It explores the practitioners’ comments about the impact of their organisations’ partnerships with social services on their work. This is done in the context of their conceptualisations of care and family relationships. In particular, the themes of identifying young carers and working with the family as a whole are discussed, and young carers’ workers views are compared to the conceptualisations that come across in literature from both disability studies and social work perspectives. It is concluded that young carers’ workers conceptualisations of care and disability do differ markedly from the perspectives that appear to dominate both social work theory and practice, and that this impacting on how the former view their partnerships with the latter.