Executive Summary
This project involved all social work staff from the Family Help Trust, Christchurch,
and Family Support Services Whanganui Trust in Wanganui in an exploration of what
makes home visiting social work effective. The resulting practice guideline is built on
exchange visits to each other’s workplaces, paired visits to client families, and a twoday
workshop reflecting on each person’s example of their best practice experience.
These processes produced rich data that show that best practice requires more than
knowledge and technique. Equally important is the social worker’s ability to:
• know and use the self, and
• build and sustain effective social work relationships with clients
The guidelines tease out the detail of how the self and the relationship, and social
work values, knowledge and skills work together to help families change and the
implications for management of providing a service in which the social worker’s self
and their relationship with the client are primary tools.
The analysis finds that best practice also requires mastery of:
• cycles of assessment, planning and review that connect strongly with a family’s
own goals and ways of resolving difficulties, and that work to encourage,
support and maintain momentum
• values and principles that are well integrated into agency function and
individual practice so that the ethical, relationship and safety dilemmas that
arise daily can be negotiated with the family in a respectful and effective way
The safety of children and young people is a critical issue that tests whether all the
elements of effectiveness are in place. It requires a precise balancing of all elements
– knowledge and skills to see and judge the risk, the ability to keep a positive and
trusting relationship with the family while still raising issues of abuse and neglect, and
the ability to engage the family in finding their own strengths to confront and address
the issues of violence and abuse in their family.
Agency systems, structures and processes need to be congruent with best practice
and are described in Part II. The emotional demands on social workers and the
contradictions and frustrations of their work, mostly occurring in private in the client’s
home and rarely viewed directly by supervisors, and the difficulty of measuring
definitively the impact of the social worker’s intervention mean that standard business
management is not sufficient. Agency managers and governance boards need to
understand social work; provide the policy, procedural and emotional supports
needed; and mirror the social work values in the agency’s operation and ethos.
The two agencies in this project serve slightly different client groups, one focused
entirely on families with extremely high risk and vulnerability; the other offering a
more general service with a little under half of their clients in the ultra high risk group.
The project has identified a need to look more closely at work with these families so
that their children and young people can be safe and well cared for, and the social
work support offered is safe, can be sustained over time and is effective.