Adopted in 2005 by the Board of Directors of the California Social Work Education Center (CalSWEC) in partnership with the County Welfare Directors Association and the California Department of Social Services.*

* Partially adopted from publications of the NASW, CWLA, and the Child Welfare Training Project, and California State University, Fresno. The present version is a revision of the Standards and Values adopted in 1996.

• Download a copy of the Standards and Values for Public Child Welfare Practice in California (2005)
  

1. The goal of public child welfare is to work with families and communities to protect children from abuse, neglect, and exploitation and to promote their health, safety, and nurturing so that they can grow into adulthood as healthy and positive individuals.

2. A wide range of parenting practices, varying as a result of ethnic, cultural, community, and familial differences, can provide adequate care for children.

3. A caring, protective, and effectively nurturing family with adequate resources is the best and least restrictive environment for raising children.

4. When there is danger to children, the state has the responsibility to intervene in family affairs to protect children. In such a circumstance, the safety of the child takes precedence over the rights of the parents.

5. Child welfare service should work collaboratively with the family to create a plan that emphasizes and builds on the family’s and children’s strengths and accesses formal and informal resources and supports on behalf of the family.

6. Families and children should participate to the greatest possible extent in planning and implementing their process for change. Children should participate in decisions regarding their care and needs.

7. Service decisions and service provision must be timely, effective, culturally sensitive and accessible, while focused on the achievement of specific outcomes for the child and family.

8. The family has the right to privacy and confidentiality and to be informed of the limits of confidentiality in public child welfare situations.

9. Every reasonable effort should be made to preserve and strengthen a child’s existing family before an alternative placement is considered. The state requires an adequate, not an ideal, standard of care for children.

10. Every child has the right to a permanent home for his or her care and upbringing; appropriate legal permanency should be achieved as quickly as possible while insuring child safety.

11. Child welfare practitioners must be able to use the self skillfully, be aware of the potential impact of personal feelings upon professional decision- making, and manage those feelings appropriately.

12. Management practice must be responsive to the ways in which clients and employees are diverse in values, ethnicity, gender, disabilities, affectional preferences, age, and religion.

13. Public child welfare and the community share responsibility for providing needed services to children, and the public child welfare agency and its staff are accountable to the community when providing child welfare services.

14. Social work practice must take into account the impact of social and economic deprivation and personal problems on child abuse and neglect.