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Engaging and including fathers in social work interventions continues to be an important issue in research and practice.
Fathers and men in families must be considered part of the ‘core business’ of social work. There continues to be a need to overcome barriers to father inclusion and support innovative and positive practice in this area. Father inclusion is especially significant when there are serious child welfare concerns, where the need to offer both challenge and support to fathers is crucial. UEA research has been part of this area of work for many years, contributing ground-breaking studies and undertaking innovative dissemination, engagement, and impact work.
Our work on fathers and father inclusion has informed policy and practice guidance, including The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel Report, The Myth of Invisible Men (2021), guidance and resources for working with parents involved in repeat care proceedings and practice guidance for engaging and working with fathers in Child Safeguarding in Norfolk.
Dr Georgia Philip
Read more...Dr Georgia Philip is a lecturer in Social Work and Sociology in the School of Social Work and has been instrumental in this programme of work. She has led teams from the University of East Anglia and Lancaster University and developing collaborative partnerships with local authorities, creative arts and voluntary sector organisations. Georgia also leads on dissemination, impact and engagement work built from the fathers’ research, delivering training and professional development activities, supporting communities of practice, and reviewing or advising on research projects. Georgia regularly works with The Fatherhood Institute advising and collaborating on research and training/dissemination materials.
Professor Marian Brandon
Professor Marian Brandon has a distinguished career as a social work academic and educator, with research expertise in child protection, family support and inter-agency working. She has directed national analyses of serious case reviews – now known as local child safeguarding practice reviews or child practice reviews – in England and Wales covering cases for over two decades. Marian directed the UEA study of fathers’ experiences of child protection services and co-directed our study of fathers and recurrent care proceedings.
Dr Cassian Rawcliffe
Dr Cassian Rawcliffe is a lecturer and researcher within the UEA School of Social Work and has experience of working across the social care sector in both adult and children & families social work. His PhD research looked at the experiences of male victims of domestic violence. His wider research interests include domestic abuse, narrative and identity, and working with men and masculinity.
Research
Engagement and Impact work
Georgia designed and teaches a professional development module called Working with Men in Families, grounded in the UEA fathers’ research. The module is available to qualified social workers as part of the School of Social Work’s professional development programme either as a stand-alone module or as part of a Masters’ course. She also facilitates training and development activities/events for local authorities, voluntary organisations, Adoption Agencies and the Consortium of Voluntary Adoption Agencies, with a focus on working with marginalised birth fathers.
Since 2020, she has led an innovative programme of work called ‘How’s Your Father?’
‘How’s Your Father?’ (HYF) is an approach to developing professional practice with fathers involved in social care services, combining academic research with theatre to bring research findings to life.
To date the HYF project consists of a live theatre show, practitioner workshops, and online training resources hosted on a dedicated website. The theatre show is based on findings from 'Counting Fathers In' and 'Up Against it' and tells the stories of four men and their encounters with social work services, and the family court. Each story poses different questions on what it means to be a father, what challenges fathers can face and present, and why fatherhood matters for all of us. There have been two tours of the HYF live show, with the second, in 2023, delivered directly to social work practitioners across East Anglia along with practice workshops. The HYF project has been co-funded by The Nuffield Foundation, UEA Research Impact fund, and Arts Council England.
HYF is a collaboration between The School of Social Work UEA, Simon Floyd, creative director at Floyd Performance and The Common Lot, Dads’ Matter a service for fathers delivered by Norfolk County Council, and MensCraft, a Norfolk charity supporting men and boys.