What do the lives of children, young people, and families look like today? Where does social work with children, young people and families stand today? How can these services support children on their path to adulthood?
A large number of children and youth services and facilities are available in Switzerland. On the one hand they support, protect and accompany children and young people. On the other, services provide parenting support. Taken together, children and youth services is a field of action under-going dynamic development and grounded on the interaction of local authorities, cantons, and private agencies. Child and youth services offers are aimed at promoting children, young people, and families, at enabling them to cope with particular challenges and burdens, and at providing parenting support under difficult family circumstances. This field of action is central to our research and development activities. Our key working areas are:
Fields of action and concepts of child and youth services
Our work in this area explores and researches the following topics and fields of action:
- Open child and youth work, child and youth development
- School-to-apprenticeship transitions and independent living
- School social work
- Child protection, assessment of threats to the child’s welfare
- Parenting support: residential education, foster families, ambulatory family support
- Use of media and media competence of children, young people and parents
- Social participation of children and youths
The structures and conditions of children and youth services
Our key task in this area is to describe and to analyse the structures and conditions of children and youth services and to support developmental process. We offer:
- Situational analyses: Describing the children and youth services available in cantons, regions, and local communities
- Supporting processes for developing children and youth services and their structures
- Supporting the establishment and maintaining of statistics and monitoring in children and youth services
- Supporting processes for developing communal youth and family guidelines
- Cooperation with local authorities, services, and service providers
- Indication concepts
- Quality development
The life-situations and ways of life of children, young people and families
Lacking knowledge of the life-situations and ways of life of children, youths, and families means lacking crucial indicators for enabling the offerings and forms of actions of children and youth services to meet actual needs. Our current work therefore focuses on the following areas:
- Living situation and offers tailored to needs
- Mediatisation of childhood and youth
About us
Institute staff undertake research and development, provide services, run further education programmes, and teach on the FHNW’s Bachelor and Master of Arts in Social Work.
We provide the following services:
- Evaluations
- Situational analyses and needs analyses
- Developing communal youth and family guidelines
- Supporting programme development and innovations
- Analysing the structures and steering mechanisms of children and youth services
- Inhouse training
Contact us! — Our priority is to tailor projects to your specific needs. We take the greatest care to establish your needs, in order to help you achieve your objectives.
Contact
Prof. Dr. Kay Biesel
E-mailTelephone
Prof. Dr. Rahel Heeg
E-mail TelephoneFHNW School of Social Work, Muttenz
FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland
School of Social Work
Hofackerstrasse 30
CH-4132 Muttenz