Towards a human-centred participatory approach to child social care recordkeeping

In 2019, there were over 75,000 children and young people in out-of-home care in England and Wales. Recent estimates suggest that up to half a million British people were in state or voluntary care as children, around 1% of the adult population. While individual experiences vary enormously by time and place, care-experienced people share in common the intensive documentation of their lives by social workers, educators, health professionals and associated practitioners. A complex, fragmented legislative and regulatory framework governs the creation and use of these records at the national level. Under UK law, a ‘care file’ must be retained for at least 75 years, so that a substantial legacy of care data is held across the public, voluntary and private sectors. MIRRA: Memory—Identity—Rights in Records—Access, a participatory research project co-produced with care leavers, investigated recordkeeping practices in child social care from multiple perspectives. Interviews, focus groups and workshops with stakeholders identified critical failings in the creation, use, management and access to care records, which do not account for the needs and capabilities of multiple stakeholders. These failings have a direct impact on the well-being and health of care-experienced people throughout their lives. MIRRA researchers developed a human-centred participatory recordkeeping approach to child social care, which this article describes. The approach combines the participatory continuum model (Rolan in Arch Sci 17(3):195–225. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10502-016-9267-7, 2017) and the capabilities approach to social work, rooting child social care recordkeeping in information rights principles. The article makes a contribution to the literature that discusses archival science within a human rights and ethics framework and reflects on trauma-informed practice for information professionals. It also provides guidance on practice improvements for child social care recording.