The potential of practice research to advance a framework for protective support and supportive protection (PS-SP) with children, young people and families

This chapter explores how a framework for protective support and supportive protection (PS-SP) can be developed through practice research and in partnership with children, young people, and families involved in child welfare systems. The framework uses ecological and life course theory to ensure critical engagement with socio-economic and structural factors such as poverty and discrimination. It requires a holistic focus on the life course of children and families, connections between life histories, and intergenerations. It aims to capture the 'both-and' dimensions of interventions with children and families discussed in the Introduction. It shows how we can apply knowledge and reasoning around the concept of 'protective support and supportive protection' (sense) through implementation via supervision, practice research, partnership, and dialogue (sensibility). To date, the PS-SP framework has been based on hypothesis, research, and policy evidence and academic analysis limited to 'Mode 1' research with more focus on the 'sense' than the 'sensibility'. To progress, it is necessary to focus more on interrogating on the processes of how support and protection are mediated. This involves engaging practitioners in active research testing, design, evaluation, and critique (see Marthinsen and Julkunen, 2012). Alongside 'data', 'categories', 'standards' and 'procedures' in child protection and welfare, there is a need for a strengths-based approach to mediation and engagement from practitioners, in dialogue with young people and families. We suggest our framework offers a scaffold for a dynamic interplay of sense and sensibility toward improving how we support and protect children, youth, and families within child welfare contexts. However, it needs to be applied via a collaborative practice research approach to move from a conceptual frame for thinking and supervision to a dynamic frame that is tested and interrogated by those with direct lived experience of supporting and protection and/ or being supported and protected within child welfare contexts. In other words, to translate the 'sense' of the PS-SP framework to the 'sensibility' of dialogue and implementation, a practice research approach is one useful way forward which we explore in the second paragraph. We are not however in a position to claim that this approach will necessarily address the persistent complex challenges of mediating between support and protection to achieve the best outcomes for children, young people, and families. We also know practice research needs 'slow scholarship' (Wahab et al, 2022) at a time when immediate and urgent answers are sought. In our discussion and conclusion, we can hypothesise, however, that it will add to, enhance, and/or transform the knowledge base from within which we currently operate.