{"id":200,"date":"2026-08-28T15:23:53","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T15:23:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/criminology\/?p=200"},"modified":"2026-09-03T16:06:55","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T16:06:55","slug":"it-takes-a-system-strengthening-child-wellbeing-in-johannesburg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/criminology\/2026\/08\/28\/it-takes-a-system-strengthening-child-wellbeing-in-johannesburg\/","title":{"rendered":"It takes a system: strengthening child wellbeing in Johannesburg"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sadiyya Haffejee, Lerato Mahwai, Diane Levine and Himanshu Kaul<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Centre for Social Development in Africa, University of Johannesburg; School of Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leicester; School of Engineering, University of Leicester<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n

What does it take to support a child to flourish?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It sounds like a simple question, but for our British Academy-funded Evidence into Action<\/a> project, it very quickly became a complicated one. A child struggling at school may also be living in a household experiencing financial pressure. A health problem may affect attendance and learning. What happens at home, at school and in the surrounding community matters. So too do access to food, healthcare, social protection and supportive relationships.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Put differently and unsurprisingly, child wellbeing does not sit neatly within the boundaries of any single service or profession.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Over the past year, colleagues in CSSP and Engineering at the University of Leicester and Centre for Social Development in Africa at the University of Johannesburg have been working with partners in Johannesburg to explore what happens when we approach child wellbeing differently: not as a collection of separate problems, but as something produced through interconnected social systems.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Building a Community of Practice<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The project builds on a Community of Practice (CoP) established in South Africa in 2020. The CoP\u2019s approach aims to address the issue that if children’s lives cut across education, health, welfare, family and community systems, then the people responsible for supporting them need ways of working across those systems too.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For this phase of the research, we worked with six resource-constrained primary schools across the City of Johannesburg, alongside the Gauteng Department of Social Development, the City of Johannesburg’s Human Development Directorate, Johannesburg Child Welfare and colleagues at the University of Johannesburg.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The focus was children in Grade R \u2013 the first year of formal schooling \u2013 and their families. We looked across several dimensions of wellbeing, including education, health, food security, financial circumstances, and protection and care.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For us, though, this wasn’t just about collecting data. We wanted to work through research to help practitioners and policy makers identify where children and families might need additional support and, through the Community of Practice, connect those needs with people and organisations able to respond.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Turning evidence into something practitioners can use<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A key part of the project was the Child Well-Being Tracking Tool (CWTT), which had been proof-of-concept through earlier phases of the Community of Practice research.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For this study, researchers and implementing partners worked together to revise and streamline the tool, making it quicker and easier for practitioners to use while retaining its ability to build a multidimensional picture of children’s wellbeing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Colleagues at the University of Leicester then helped to turn the revised tool into a digital app. Trained social workers could use it with children and caregivers, with the information helping to identify areas in which additional assessment, referral or support might be appropriate.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Between September 2025 and January 2026, the project worked with 143 Grade R children and their caregivers, alongside teachers across the six participating schools.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The resulting picture is deliberately multidimensional. There are important signs of strength in children’s lives, alongside areas in which children and families face considerable pressures. Unsurprisingly, those pressures do not necessarily occur in isolation. A difficulty categorised as ‘health’, ‘financial’ or ‘education’, for example, may be connected to circumstances elsewhere in the child’s life.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Those detailed findings will be the subject of further academic work. But the project has already reinforced something important about the way we research child wellbeing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Finding a problem is only the beginning<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Researchers are generally quite good at identifying problems. The harder question is what happens next.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A survey can tell us that a family is experiencing food insecurity, that a caregiver may need additional support, or that a child has a health need. But identifying vulnerability is of limited value if the system around that family cannot respond to it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is where the Community of Practice approach becomes particularly important.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Social workers used the information generated through the research to make contact with families, undertake further assessment and case management, connect caregivers with parenting programmes, provide or facilitate food support, make external referrals and continue monitoring where needs could not be resolved immediately.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The process was not seamless \u2013 nor should we expect real-world social systems to be. Families can be difficult to contact. Services operate under significant pressure. Practitioners have competing demands on their time, and recording and tracking activity itself creates an administrative burden. The project encountered precisely these kinds of implementation challenges.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But these difficulties are themselves important. They remind us that moving from knowing<\/em> about children’s needs to responding<\/em> to them is not a simple pipeline from evidence to intervention. It is a social process.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Researching the system, not just the child<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For us, this is one of the most valuable aspects of this work.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A multisystemic approach asks us to move beyond locating either vulnerability or resilience solely within an individual child. Children’s wellbeing emerges through relationships with caregivers, schools, communities, services, institutions and wider social and economic conditions.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The same is true of our capacity to support them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

No individual teacher, social worker, nurse, parent, school or government department can address every dimension of a child’s wellbeing. But neither are those actors independent of one another. What matters is not simply whether resources exist somewhere within a system, but whether children and families can actually reach them, and whether the different parts of that system can work together.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That means strengthening child wellbeing is partly about strengthening the connections between people and organisations.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Our Johannesburg project is a relatively small study: six schools, one age group and 143 children and their families. We therefore need to be cautious about what can be concluded from it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But it provides an important opportunity to think about what evidence-informed practice looks like when we take children’s lives seriously as multisystemic.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Fundamentally, though, we learned that the most useful question is not only: “What does this child need?”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It is also: “What needs to connect around this child for that need to be met?”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

That is a question we will continue exploring across our partnership.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The project was funded by the British Academy and undertaken by researchers at the University of Johannesburg and University of Leicester in partnership with the Gauteng Department of Education, Gauteng Department of Social Development, City of Johannesburg (Human Development), Johannesburg Child Welfare, participating schools, social workers, teachers, children and caregivers.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sadiyya Haffejee, Lerato Mahwai, Diane Levine and Himanshu Kaul   Centre for Social Development in Africa, University of Johannesburg; School of Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leicester; School of Engineering, University of Leicester   What does it take to support a child to flourish?   It sounds like a simple question, but for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":358,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/358"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200"}],"version-history":[{"count":47,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200\/revisions\/264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/criminology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}