This article explores children's learning experiences from taking part in an educational intervention about social services in school. Data were collected from six group interviews with 27 children after they had participated in lessons about social services. Following a narrative evaluation approach, the analysis focuses on the narratives of change that are made visible through the children's shared reflections about their learning experiences.Findings In their narratives of change, the children presented the educational intervention as meaningful for them because it increased their knowledge about social services as a possible support function for children and families. Some of the children related their previous more negative perceptions of social services to a collective story building on the idea that social services take children away from their families. Through the educational intervention, this collective story changed in part into another collective story building on the idea that social services help children and families to improve their relationships.Applications The study shows that an educational intervention about social services in school has the potential to increase children's knowledge about social services and to influence in a positive direction the collective stories that shape public perceptions of social work. Although such changes in collective stories can be expected to benefit social work practice, welfare professionals must be careful to promote opportunities for children to share experiences of social services that challenge, as well as align with, any of these collective stories.

Despite a strong emphasis on user participation in social services, scientific knowledge on how to achieve these goals is limited. The aim of this study is to explore what social work practitioners identify as challenging in implementing user participation and what solutions they propose to be necessary to meet these challenges. Future workshops were applied, combining data from brainstorming processes and from the participants’ analytical work, identifying current obstacles and co-creating solutions. The workshops took place at the Personal Social Services section in a suburban area outside a large city in Sweden with 95 participants. The findings are discussed in relation to a model of participation, where creating openings, opportunities, and obligations are essential. The participants highlighted the need to strengthen commitment to user participation, increased access to knowledge and methods that enhance user participation, and support from management, with increased resources to ensure continuous development and maintenance. Practitioners must be able to engage in user participation, and actions need to be taken at all organizational levels. To overcome a complex and intertwined set of challenges, an intertwined set of solutions is required. 

There is an emphasis on user participation in social work. The arguments derive from both a democratic and a consumerist approach, aiming on the one hand to equalize power between users and professionals, and on the other hand, for more efficient and legitimized services. However, research shows that there is a lack of knowledge about methods and conditions for realizing user participation in social services. In this exploratory study, grounded in participatory design, a set of four workshops took place, enabling young people, social workers and researchers to participate in the design process. The data were analysed with affinity analysis, a technique whereby the data are sorted with I labels, to stay close to the material. Also, written feedback and reflections from participants as well as oral feedback and reflections were generated, documented and integrated with the affinity analysis. The main findings concern how the participatory approach revealed tensions between the participants' different perspectives on user participation, which in turn contributed to the shaping of a dy-namic tool. The findings imply that the tool needed to be both fair and square to ensure equality for all young people, and dynamic and flexible to meet the uniqueness of each young person. Moreover, the tool needed to be both rich and contextualized to meet the need for information and participation throughout the transition process, and simple and accessible to meet the acute nature of many transitions as well as the overall time constraints within social work practice. The research process reached the level of contribution, with involvement in some but not all stages labelled as collaboration. The wide range of expertise involved in the design process provides a good basis for the tool to be able to address the need for increased user participation in social work practice.

The aim of this study is to explore how schoolchildren reflect on children's help-seeking in the context of family adversity after participating in lessons about the child welfare services. A thematic narrative analysis was conducted, building on participating pupils' shared reflections on a fictitious story about two siblings living in adverse family circumstances. The analysis suggests that the pupils held a strong belief on children's rights to a safe home with supportive parental relationships, and they expressed an optimistic view on children's opportunities to receive help to achieve positive change when their rights regarding these issues were not met.

The article highlights the experiences of introducing an educational programme about social ser-vices in schools, with a focus on the perspectives of children and young people. The aim is to describe how the students’ knowledge of and attitudes towards social services have changed after participating in the teaching activities as well as how the students reflect on the teaching and on their acquired knowledge. The results show that the students appreciated the information they had received. They emphasized the value of knowing the social services, learning about what the social services do, and learning that children and young people can contact the social services when they are in need of help or support. The results also indicate that the students’ knowledge of the social services was strengthened and that their attitudes towards the social services were more positive after participating in the teaching activities. The students themselves described how their image of the social services had changed and the social services was described as a possible alterna-tive for help-seeking, should they be in need of help or support.

This article explores birth parents' negotiations on the identity of the birth mother in three narratives about shared parenthood in foster care. The article draws on data from an interview study exploring the views of 16 birth parents on their experiences of foster care and non-resident parenthood. Through a position analysis, the authors show how the identity of the birth mother is negotiated in light of the moral discourse on intensive mothering. In these stories, birth mothers are positioned as authentic mothers holding a unique, emotional and life-long bond with their children. In contrast, foster mothers are positioned as professional mothers carrying out the formal activities of everyday care. Birth parents re-negotiate the moral discourse on intensive mothering by downplaying the importance of everyday care. The article thus adds to our knowledge on how non-resident mothers find different ways of constructing a sense of mothering, when they are not able to take part in the everyday care of their children. An understanding of such processes is important for social work practice to handle the challenges that may occur in relationships between foster parents and birth parents and thereby to support a more collaborative approach of shared parenthood.

Knowledge regarding the needs of parents whose children are placed in out-of-home care is still limited and studies focusing on interventions targeting this group are scarce. This article explores birth parents' views on their needs and perceptions of support delivered by two different interventions: one offering support to individuals and the other providing a parental group. The methodology comprised a thematic analysis of 14 qualitative interviews. Parents' expressed needs revolved around five issues: participation and influence in the relations with child welfare services; their emotional needs; their social needs; their relationship with their child; and practical and financial arrangements. The results revealed that the two interventions had overlapping as well as specific supportive functions and that these met some of the identified needs. Both programmes provided an opportunity for parents to speak openly about their grief and experiences of stigma and to receive help to cope with it, thus functioning as empowering and stigma-relieving practices that provide emotional support. The intervention that offered individual support contributed to a reduction in parents' feelings of powerlessness when negotiating with child welfare services and functioned as an equalising practice by facilitating participation and influence. The parental group succeeded in reducing parents' social isolation, providing social support and functioning as a normalising practice. However, neither intervention was explicitly perceived as helpful for improving parent-child relationships or practical and financial arrangements. The study highlights how the parents benefitted from receiving different types of support and contributes to knowledge about a group that has been neglected in practice and research.