Child Social-Care Recording and the Information Rights of Care-Experienced People: A Recordkeeping Perspective

Recent reports by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) emphasised the critical importance of records throughout the lives of care-experienced people. Records not only contain information about what happened to a person in their past, but also have long-term effects on memory and identity. Research emerging in the context of analogous national inquiries into the systemic abuse and neglect of children in care—particularly the Royal Commission in Australia and the Shaw Report in Scotland—have highlighted the significance of records to campaigns for reparative justice. This article introduces MIRRA: Memory—Identity—Rights in Records—Access, which is a participatory action research project co-produced with care-leavers and researchers based at University College London (UCL). This ongoing study seeks to deepen our understanding of the creation, use and management of care records and protocols to access them. In this article, we consider the practice of social work recording with children and families in England since the 1970s from a ‘recordkeeping perspective’, importing theory from the information studies field to provide a new perspective on the information rights of care-leavers.