SUMMARY: Black and minority ethnic children in need of protection receive a poor response from health and social services. Practitioners are reluctant to intervene, and when intervention does take place it reflects a eurocentric approach that fails to engage with the ethnic diversity of vulnerable children. Increasing the levels of safety far all children, black and white, suffering or likely to suffer significant harm, requires taking positive action: collecting ethnically relevant data, a commitment to an equitable distribution of resources, consulting children and parents and involving them in planning and designing services.

Given the quintessentially collaborative nature of social work practice research, many researchers have explored the utility of participatory action research for promoting collaborative learning and knowledge production in social work. As a response to this call for participatory practice research methodology, we developed and piloted ‘collaborative practice research in social work’ in the project, ‘Empowering Social Workers in Challenging Times: Learning from Best Practice during COVID-19’. ‘Collaborative practice research in social work’ is a networked approach to social work participatory practice research, designed to integrate practice wisdom and research evidence to produce useful knowledge for social workers to practise ethically and effectively during COVID-19. This article will present some findings from the evaluation of ‘collaborative practice research in social work’, showing how the reversed sequence of involvement (practitioner researchers first and then academics) in research can enable practitioner-led learning, democratise knowledge production and help validate different types of knowledge in social work practice research. ‘Collaborative practice research in social work’ has demonstrated the need to address alienating academic practices that are not sensitive to the needs of practice or see practice as an afterthought. Findings further suggest the need to better prepare academic researchers to engage with participatory practice research, which can be an emotionally unsettling and unfamiliar research environment.

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