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W - Jargon Buster
WINDSCREEN (of needs and interventions)
Welfare is a word that has been used to refer to children’s well-being (‘child welfare’) for many years, indeed for most of the last century. It has been used in this sense in legislation, including the Children Act 1989 (although the Act did not define ‘welfare’). Over recent years, however, ‘child welfare’ has come to be used rather less as synonymous with children’s well-being as a whole, and instead rather more narrowly associated with child safety issues and child protection (although it is by no means used exclusively in this sense by everyone). As the Children Act 2004 includes a definition of children’s ‘well-being’ that is now likely to become the generally accepted holistic term. ‘Child welfare’, on the other hand, is likely to become ever more narrowly associated with children’s safety. Section 11 of the Children Act 2004 places a duty on local authorities and other agencies to have regard ‘to the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children’ when exercising their normal duties.
Although ‘well-being’ is an everyday term, it has taken on a more precise meaning for children’s practitioners with the Children Act 2004. For the first time, the Act (section 10) places a duty on local authorities and other key agencies to ‘co-operate with a view to improving the well-being of children’. Specifically, agencies are required to make arrangements to improve the well-being of children relating to the five ‘outcomes’ set out in the Green Paper, Every Child Matters.
WINDSCREEN (of needs and interventions)
A descriptor in Every Child Matters of four main needs; universal, vulnerable, complex and acute
Page updated: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 12:07 PM
