A review of the literature about ‘child’s maladjustment at school’reveals three principal perspectives which construe ‘the problems of child her/himself’ i.e. individual pathology, poor service of school to identify and meet the needs of a child, and a failure of family & parenting support for children experiencing difficulties in their lives. Facing these problems, the Education Welfare Service tries to identify the needs of a child at an early stage, take a lead role in child protection issues and family support for social work services required by school and statutory duties, doing the preventive role of the service.
The Education Welfare Service in UK is family support service, focusing on the child welfare which includes education welfare, child protection, legal support for education welfare practice, withdrawn child support, after school education, home schooling support, assessment for special education needs, extracurricular activities for school maladjustment child, parental conference for school maladjustment child, coordination of school-legal system-local education office/local government office, and education related social work services.
Although education welfare service in UK has been successful in education fields, which is based on social work practice and skills, there have been more needs in terms of child priority efforts in service processes, advanced and continuing education to adapt to changing societies, integration & coordination between organizations, finding resources in local society, avoiding duplication of efforts, and limiting of education welfare service.
The critical explorations of education welfare service in UK as shown above indicate that child welfare service should make efforts to develop an advanced service delivery system for the integrated social work service. Those efforts will lead to the maximized effectiveness and efficiency of child welfare service for advanced social work practice.