Shanee Barraclough

The present article reports foster carer perceptions of the long‐term effectiveness of a carer‐focussed training intervention – the Fostering Changes (FC) programme. Five foster carers who completed FC at a not‐for‐profit child and family agency in New Zealand were interviewed 13–15 months post‐training about their experiences and perceptions of FC and its subsequent effectiveness. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) informed both data collection and analysis. Five superordinate themes were identified: (1) FC is perceived to be an effective training programme that provides sustained benefits; (2) foster carer training is crucially important; (3) the challenges of fostering continue, irrespective of training; (4) caregiver confidence gained from training wanes over time in the face of persistent challenges; (5) foster carers require ongoing therapeutic interventions and support because of their children's persistent behavioural and relational difficulties. The findings suggest that, while FC provides effective and relevant training, carers simultaneously require ongoing clinical services. Practitioner points Children in out‐of‐home care who have persistent relational and mental health difficulties require ongoing specialised therapeutic support Foster carer group training (such as Fostering Changes) may help to stabilise children's placements and mental health recovery but does not replace the need for personalised, systemic interventions with caregivers Foster carer group therapeutic training is preferably integrated within ongoing, systemic, multi‐component interventions, rather than offered as discrete, stand‐alone interventions

Post-humanist theories and feminist new materialism are a growing feature of social work scholarship. It is timely to explore how these theories inform qualitative social work research approaches. Drawing on post-qualitative methodology and Barad’s concept and method of diffraction, in this article we engage in a performative re-analysis of an account of school social work practice with a group of boys with behavioural concerns. We illuminate the interplay of neurological and behaviourist ways of knowing boys and social workers’ expertise and their linkages with the materiality of the place and space of the school-based group programme. Moving beyond merely representing these material-discursive happenings, this paper affirms new social worker identities and behavioural boys’ subjectivities which emerge within the entangled relations with non-human, material objects and things in schools. Doing post-qualitative inquiry, co-configures us as researchers actively involved in knowledge generation as we seek to make differences that matter in social work practice. Diffraction not only offers methods to engage with the material-discursive interface of social work knowledge practices, but also an ethical methodology for researchers to do justice in our engagement with research data.