Building the Working Alliance Based on Confidence That Can Be Earned
Why a working alliance has to be built on confidence, not trust — and what Peter Connelly's case still teaches about caseload as a safeguarding variable, not a budget line.
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Disguised Compliance: The Confidence Measure's Hardest Case
What happens when a family performs cooperation fluently while nothing changes behind it, and the four markers that catch it when a single home visit can’t.
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Capacity on Both Sides of the Door
Why capacity, not intention, governs whether a stalled case moves — on both sides of the door, from an overwhelmed caseworker to a parent whose depression, not willingness, is what’s missing.
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The Moralising of Poverty
From a 1994 murder case to the 2026 breakfast clubs debate — why structural poverty keeps getting mistaken for individual moral failing, and what that costs a family.
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Race and the Licensing of Discourse
Why speaking about racism in general has become abundant in Britain while naming it in one specific safeguarding case has stayed almost unlicensed — the same finding, confirmed three times in twenty-two years.
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Self-Imposed Enclosure: When a Community's Boundary Fails Safeguarding
From the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ two-witness rule to the Church of England’s handling of John Smyth — the same structural mechanism, documented across communities with almost nothing else in common.
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More Responsibility, Less Training: How Safeguarding Moved Down the Ladder
A decade and a half of frontline safeguarding judgement moving from qualified social workers to a wider, less-trained workforce tier — examined as a training gap, a risk gap, and an accountability gap, not as a simple case of standards slipping.
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What the UK Doesn't Know About the Cost of Keeping Children Safe
UNISON's solo-visits survey, HSE and insurance data, and international comparators from the Netherlands, Norway, and the US, all tested for what they actually show — and fail to show — about the risk and cost of frontline safeguarding work.
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The Orientation of Fresh Social Work Students
What social work students are really being taught in their first assignments — not niceness, but the discipline of testing lived experience against evidence before it's safe to use on someone else's family.
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AI and Higher Education
Generative AI has broken the university's oldest assessment proxy — the fluent essay as evidence of underpinning knowledge. What replaces it: process-based assessment, degree apprenticeships, and the reverse obligation on industry.
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After Munro. Who is listening now?
The government's reform and Eileen Munro's own critique of it both claim the evidence — but neither side asks whether the conference room itself, whoever chairs it, does what either assumes.
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The Case of the Missing Hours: A Columbo Investigation
What professional curiosity actually looks like — and what gets missed when practitioners settle for the obvious explanation.
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The Epistemology of Safeguarding
What we know, how we know it, and why it matters. The philosophical foundations of professional decision-making.
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Living in a Fabricated World
Reality, illusion, and Spock’s wisdom on certainty — why the confident assessment is always the one to question hardest.
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Navigating Truth and Deception
Student conduct and safeguarding — what professional curiosity requires when accounts don’t stack up.
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When Abstraction Is Out of Reach
How limited early experience shapes thinking — and what it looks like when a client genuinely cannot think ahead.
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From Zebras to Ravens
A safeguarding typology for young people who cannot be contained — and what the research says about each position.
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The Zealots Among Us
When passionate certainty impedes what it seeks to protect — the organisational cost of ideology in practice.
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