If We Know What Works, Why Aren't We Doing It?

Abstract High rates of child removal from parents with learning disabilities persist despite substantial evidence that parents with learning disabilities can provide their children with satisfactory care given appropriate support. Child welfare interventions disproportionality based on disability status presents a compelling social issue deserving urgent attention. Co-operative inquiry was used to analyse attitudinal and structural barriers that perpetuate inequitable treatment of parents with learning disabilities and their children, drawing on policy and practice examples from Australia and the UK. Bacchi’s ‘What is the problem represented to be?’ approach to social policy issues was used to answer the question: if we know what works to support parents with learning disabilities, why aren’t we doing it? This commentary contends that the pervasive representation of parents with learning disabilities as inherently deficient in the requisite skills (‘parenting capacity’) needed for safe caregiving has been difficult to shift due to systematic ableism. Neoliberal policies stigmatise a need for support (‘dependence’) as an individual failing and recast assessments of long-term support needs as an unsustainable burden on support services/systems. We conclude that for outcomes to change for parents with learning disabilities and their children a social model of child protection that addresses attitudinal and structural barriers and is based on principles of interdependence, relationality, and ethics of care is required. High rates of child removal from parents with learning disabilities are an urgent social policy issue. The authors used co-operative inquiry to explore why so little progress has been made to keep children with their parents with learning disabilities despite evidence that, with support, they can and do learn to be safe caregivers. The commentary reports on the use of a social policy analysis approach developed by Bacchi called ‘What is the problem represented to be?’. This approach was used to structure an analysis of underlying social attitudes towards parents with learning disabilities and how these attitudes underpin child welfare policies and practices. The authors show how concepts such as parenting capacity reinforce negative beliefs and assumptions about these parents as incapable and unable to learn. Need and risk assessments are weaponised to show that support needs are an individual failing and too high, which justifies systemic failu