Introduction

“In order to develop normally, a child needs the enduring, irrational involvement of one or more adults in care of and in joint activity with that child. In short, somebody has to be crazy about that kid. Someone also has to be there, and to be doing something—not alone but together with the child” (Bronfenbrenner 2005, 262).

In 1991, Sir William Utting was commissioned by the UK Secretary of State to conduct a review of residential care in England and evaluate the transformative potential of the Children Act 1989, which was to come into force later that year. Utting was following in the wake of the Staffordshire Child Care Inquiry (Levy and Kahan 1991) as part of efforts within the British government to assess whether issues of abuse and neglect were of nationwide concern. Utting was optimistic about the new legislation and concluded—with the large caveat of there being “an imperative need for effective implementation”—that, “the new legal framework, and the regulations and guidance which go with it, provide a radically new framework which, if fully used, should both oblige and help local authorities and others to address… problems [present within the current residential care system] effectively” (p. 23). One of the more radical elements of the Children Act 1989 was the scope it outlined for the responsibilities of local authorities with regard to children in their care. Utting described this as a departure from precedent and noted that the idea of the “corporate parent” as outlined in the Act and its guiding materials “impl[ies] a warmth and personal concern which goes beyond the traditional expectations of institutions” (p. 26).

The concept of the corporate parent and its emphasis on affective dimensions of institutional activities and relationships has continued to be elaborated upon in the last few decades and has been integrated into law and policy across the UK.Footnote 1 The affective aspirations of the corporate parent are what makes it unique—while most of the legislation itself discusses supporting and protecting the “best interests” and “wellbeing” of children in the same way that other Commonwealth governments have penned legislation relating to the care of children, guidance published about corporate parenting emphasises an ethos that aspires to have “everyone from the Chief Executive down to front line staff, as well as elected council members, [feel] concerned about those children and care leavers as if they were their own” (Department for Education 2018, §1.3). While it has not officially been adopted by other jurisdictions, the orientation towards holistic care that is at the centre of the corporate parent philosophy has been praised by child welfare and protection scholars for its potential to introduce more supportive approaches to caring for children in and leaving care (Coman and Devaney 2011; France et al. 2010; Higgins and Katz 2008; Mendes et al. 2011; Ruch 2005; Schües and Rehmann-Sutter 2013; Wheatley 2023). However, despite praise for the philosophy and calls for it to be adopted in other jurisdictions, there is significant dissonance between the idea of corporate parenting and reality of its manifestation in modern UK practice. Utting’s concerns regarding “the sector's history of policy neglect and indifferent management” impacting the ability of the Act to fully realise the changes it sought to implement have shown to be predictive when considering the reality of residential (and other out-of-home) care systems in the UK today (p. 19). Care experienced children in the UK, as with their peers in other countries, do not consistently see the system as parentally ‘caring’ nor do they find that it is successful in helping them to achieve a smooth transition into adulthood (Barnes 2012; Brown et al. 2019; Butterworth et al. 2017; Duncalf 2010; Gaskell 2010; Hiles et al. 2013; Natalier and Johnson 2015; Roberts et al. 2021; Rogers 2011).

For many who have pondered the efficacy of a corporate parent, this lack of success could have been easily predicted. In the same year that the Children Act 1989 was introduced, Parker and Milham (1989) wrote: “Can a state parent? The characteristics of parental love are that it is partisan, unconditional, does not cease, does not have cut-off points, is long-suffering and does not evaluate. The state cannot replicate this. Few parents are indifferent to their children but the state, with its emphasis on fairness and equality, cannot get too emotionally involved” (p. 5). However, I believe that there is value yet to pondering how the philosophy of the corporate parent might help us to ideate for and work towards better child welfare systems across jurisdictions and cultures. When considering the lack of success of the corporate parent to date, it is necessary to consider that the system may not have yet realised the ingestion of the concept. It is worth reflecting on the difficulty for philosophy alone to drive change, particularly if the philosophical conceit is being placed on top of a system that is very reticent to change and was not designed with the same values and priorities at its core. Hatch (2021) has found that, for some working within a corporate parent framework, “organisational function and culture would take priority as opposed to being able to “parent” the care leaver indicating that [the aspirations of corporate parenting] might not be a realistic expectation” (p. 120). If there is no room for a corporate parent approach in the rules, forms, and practices that make up contemporary child welfare services, it is unsurprising that the affective dimension of the corporate parent is itself forced out of the system’s overall approach.

The recent Scottish Independent Care Review (2020) proclaimed, “Scotland cannot legislate for love and nor should it try. A legislative framework for love would be driven by an institutional view of love that could not possibly reflect the experience of being loved and cared for” (p. 5). I argue that this does not mean that we cannot find value and perhaps even necessity in cultivating a kind of corporate love. Indeed, archival scholars and practitioners are already acknowledging the role that archivists can (and should) play in facilitating individual and community access to and creation of records in a manner that combats the unfeeling and dehumanising nature of bureaucracy (see amongst others Douglas & Mills 2018; Hoyle et al. 2019; Laurent et al. 2022; Lewis 2018; McKemmish & Piggott 2013; Sutherland 2019). To this end, in this paper, I engage in speculative imagining that presupposes that creating space for acts of caring is possible and, more specifically, that care can and should be codified in our approaches to government recordkeeping. Taking the position that thinking innovatively about records can directly create pathways for the introduction (and not just the reflection) of new ways of thinking, I seek to play with the concept of the corporate parent by examining possibilities for its implications for out-of-home care recordkeeping practice. I ask: How might we, as recordkeeping professionals, engage in the creative application of our professional concepts to envision ways to capture and celebrate the spirit of the corporate parent in our records and systems? This paper will engage in the initial steps of speculative design practice to present potential avenues of future answers to this question at the intersections of new conceptualisations of provenance and the design and administration of institutional records. Drawing on ideas from archival literature that play with parental roles, duties, and desires in recordkeeping, I will propose that experimentally (co)developing records prototypes and recordkeeping workflows that support corporate parenting principles might help to disrupt what prevents the concept from fully developing in child welfare systems.

On thinking speculatively about records

My approach to this paper is particularly influenced and inspired by the work of Jessica Lapp (2019; 2023) and Claire Malek (2022), who have engaged in speculative ways of thinking rooted in queer and feminist approaches as a way of expanding our capacity to understand, affirm, and strengthen the dimensions of care that are present in archival work. Both scholars have proposed forms of reaching both back into the past and projecting forward into the future as being key to caring archives.Footnote 2 This type of simultaneous history and future building is linked to Donna Haraway’s concept of speculative fabulation—“a way of gathering the imaginative force. To tell the stories for what might yet be and already are, but even more than we imagined. Once we tell these stories, we come to appreciate how much is already happening, that we should embrace and nurture. As well as what can yet be” (Haraway 2022). In the case of child welfare, leaning into speculative thinking offers the opportunity to reckon with the gaps between care and caring, building speculative realities of having realised care as a way of finding a way forward into making it a reality.

More than just telling stories of future recordkeeping practice, I am particularly interested in considering how speculative archival practice tests the possibility of driving and reinforcing philosophical change through integrating manifestations of a philosophy into tangible tools of recordkeeping, perhaps even before they are commonly found in the zeitgeist. To do this, in addition to imagining new ways of recordkeeping, we must also imagine and design new types of records. Robustly approaching design processes using speculative thinking is at the heart of what has emerged in critical design and speculative design spaces. Johannesen, Keitsch, and Patterson (2019) offer a framework of design positionality of “Speculative and Critical Design” (SCD) and it is their step-based approach that I adopt as the scaffold for this paper’s progression. The authors suggest that to engage in SCD one must:

  1. 1.

    Define a context for debate

  2. 2.

    Ideate, find problems, and create a scenario

  3. 3.

    Materialise the scenario to provoke an audience

(Johannesen, Keitsch, and Patterson 2019, pp. 1627–1628).

This paper will primarily engage in the first two steps of this process—context definition and scenario creation—and will conclude with a call to the archival community—myself included—to collaborate with care experienced children and young people as well as care workers to engage in the step of materialisation.

Defining the context for debate

Child welfare in modern Western systems is dominated by a child protection mindset. Scholars such as Fangerau et al. (2015) and Frost and Dolan (2021) have illustrated how most major policies relating to child welfare have been made possible primarily by media coverage and public awareness of high-profile cases of child death and maltreatment. Frost and Dolan (2021) explain, “child deaths or safeguarding seemingly ‘gone wrong’ (as was the case in reference to child sexual exploitation in England between around 2006 and 2015) become headline news in the way that family support never can” and as a result “family support, in most nation states, has been overshadowed by child protection” (p. 499). This mindset can even be found in the development of the international benchmark for children’s rights: the UN Convention on the rights of the Child (CRC). In describing the backdrop for the motivations for the convention, the Committee on the Rights of the Child (no date) writes that the view that a comprehensive statement on children’s rights “was influenced by reports of grave injustices suffered by children: high infant mortality, deficient health care, limited opportunities for basic education. There were also alarming accounts of children being abused and exploited in prostitution or in harmful jobs, of children in prison or in other difficult circumstances, and of children as refugees and victims of armed conflict.”

Seeing injustice in the world and developing policy that condemns it is not inherently a bad approach. Indeed, heightened attention of the public can lead to increased accountability and offers the opportunity for intense moments of response and reflection to occur when policy interest in a particular area might have otherwise been stagnant. However, there is the potential for concern when this ever-repeating cycle of scandal leading to policy reform is constantly reenacted without ever producing significant change.Footnote 3 What we see emerge from the inquiry cycle is what I propose be referred to as an inquiry ouroboros—a system that is continually searching itself for the answers, regenerating and promising to improve only to have to reckon with the next scandal by again reviewing and promising to learn from its past. It is not sustainable, and the fact that the cycle can be traced back for decades and is still being enacted to this day shows that it is no true way to engender change. If we are to see the spirit of corporate parenting successfully integrated into our systems, we need to understand what fuels the inquiry ouroboros and keeps it at the centre of our approach to child welfare.

How might we begin to unpack some of the reasons why the structures of child welfare systems reproduce this never-ending cycle? One answer might come from how we have approached the concept of children’s rights themselves.

In a variety of disciplines that provide services relating to the rights of children—such as education and social work—the rights articulated in the CRC are often categorised into the ‘3 Ps’ of provision, protection, and participation. This categorisation of the rights of children and the subsequent use of this framing in our provision of child welfare is worth examining, as it conveys a significant aspect of the origins and motivations of child welfare policy and legislation that has significant implications for the types of activities that are viewed as important in carrying out child welfare services.

Quennerstedt (2010) provides an interesting examination of modern interpretation of the CRC that helps to explain why children’s rights conversations interrogate the notion of the 3 Ps being true categories of rights, particularly when human rights generally tend to be categorised along the much more theory-informed lines of civil, political and social rights. She argues that rather than an inherent difference between the rights of children and of humans generally, the emergence of the 3Ps can be attributed to the fact that “the historical starting point for claiming rights for children, i.e. the protection of children, is not very visible in the general language of human rights” and therefore notions of protection needed to be surfaced in order to make the Convention relatable to existing practice and concerns (p. 624). This becomes a potential problem when defining rights in this manner not only draws from historical context but begins to “increasingly define what everyone is expected to orient towards” (p. 624).

A way of understanding the problems this philosophy might imbue within the overall system is to conceptualise child protection as a method of addressing what Dean Spade, building off the work of Alan Freeman, describes as Perpetrator/Victim power, or “power operating through “subtraction”—opportunities, property, heath, life taken away from individual victims because of the bad ideas put into action by perpetrators” (Spade 2015, p. 51). Utilising an understanding that violations of rights are performed through perpetrator/victim interactions, government strategies view children as vulnerable to abuses of power that are committed by individual adults and therefore require the intervention of government through:

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    The establishment of laws that forbid certain actions by individuals that violate a child’s rights

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    The use of the justice/penal system to hold accountable and remove from society those individuals that commit these forbidden acts

Within this framework of thinking, child welfare systems have developed with the goal of preventing perpetrator/victim power imbalances and dedicate fewer resources and attention to other dimensions that create environments in which children can fail to thrive. Hyperfixation on correcting wrongs has developed a particular focus not only on the idea of dealing with bad actors through the law, but on developing forensic methods for predicting and preventing these undesired actions before they happen through frameworks of risk.

Risk and reflexive government


More than just “technical calculations of probability,” risk as a concept in modern society incorporates a network of interconnecting concepts relating to emancipation, justice, and responsibility (Douglas 1990, p. 2). Douglas (1990) identifies modern risk as being deeply intertwined with our forensic systems, writing: “Risk is invoked for a modern-style riposte against abuse of power. The charge of causing risk is a stick to beat authority, to make lazy bureaucrats sit up, to exact restitution for victims” (pp. 3–4).

When defined in this manner and considered through the lens of governmentality, risk can be understood to represent the opposite of safety or security, and therefore the preoccupation of the state in its goal to “reduce the most unfavorable, deviant normalities in relation to the normal, general curve” (Foucault 2007, p. 62). Mechanisms for reducing risk can be divided into two dimensions: first as something to be prevented through predictive activities and second as an experienced condition for which someone is due legal, financial, and emotional redress, the extent of which can be determined through investigation.

The idea that risk is calculable is attractive in the context of child protection because it proposes that there exists an objective body of evidence from which a social worker, on behalf of the government, can determine whether intervention is required and what types of actions are permissible given the situation. Where in the past social work was viewed as being an experience-based, relational profession lacking consistent or methodological practices, it has been argued that developing risk-assessment-based measures for the processes that formed social workers’ decision making could make it possible to not only measure their performance and efficiency, but also to address issues of state responsibility for decisions made about children in their care (Goddard et al. 1999; Gillingham 2006; Keddell and Stanley 2017; Munro 2009; Pithouse et al. 2011). In the pursuit of efficient, evidence-based, methodological child protection, the reporting, documentation, and assessment of risk have become the central activities of social workers and others engaged in the provision (and assessment) of child welfare and protection services. On top of dictating the design of child protection systems as they exist today, this focus on risk also creates a particular mindset in relation to how these systems ask social workers to conceive of their responsibilities. Parton (1998) argues, “Where the key concern is risk, the focus becomes, not making the right decision, but making a defensible decision, where the processes and procedures have been followed and where the range of misery and need coming the way of the child welfare agency can be prioritized and contained” (p. 21). Rather than placing children and their experiences at the heart of procedure, emphasis is placed on protecting the institution of child protection.

When the prediction and prevention of exposures to risk are held as the main goal of child protection, investigation of cases in which risk is not prevented becomes the main way of assessing the system’s efficacy and identifying how it must be changed to prevent similar incidents in the future, again reinforcing the scandal-policy reform-dormancy cycle that comprises the inquiry ouroboros. This type of methodology for assessing and improving government is the hallmark of a reflexive government strategy, which Dean (2009) describes as a mindset in which “[s]ociety itself can be changed… but this will be no longer via a conscious design based on the rational knowledge of social processes but through the transformation of the mechanisms by which it had previously governed” (p. 226). Methods for improving the faulty system involve turning the tools of audit and investigation upon the mechanisms of risk assessment and decision making to identify where they lack optimal performance. Inherent within the deployment of these tools is an acceptance of the validity of risk management as an approach, which has significant implications for the entrenchment of these methods in our societal frameworks. Examining the 1988 Butler-Sloss Inquiry in the UK, Ashenden (1996) argues, “By re-invoking the possibility of expert knowledge and proper procedure, the Report turns a problematization of the political rationality of liberal welfarism … into a technical problem admitting of a technical solution. … The public inquiry is therefore not a space of openness, argument and dialogue, but a way of producing ‘democracy’ through expertise, a way of doing politics without political engagement” (pp. 81–82).

In a system of child welfare that centres calculable risk and prioritises protection, there is little logistical or political space left for consideration of relational and affective dimensions of care, nor is there an easy way for the child welfare system to integrate other elements of the rights of children into their practice. What does this mean for recordkeeping? When risk is at the heart of child protection, the creation of records that document the risk assessment process and the ability of these records to be used as evidence to demonstrate ‘defensible’ procedural decision making becomes the heart of a social worker’s activities and the focus of a government agency’s perceived recordkeeping responsibilities. This value is further emphasised through the use of public inquiry as the primary method for addressing exposure to harmful risks.

Thinking outside the narrative of successful risk management


What are the types of conversations that would enable an exploration of the systemic issues that contribute to insecurity and poorer life chances for children and their families but are not addressed through treatments of risk? According to Spade (2015), a more nuanced model of power would consider two other dimensions that must be considered in addition to perpetrator/victim power. These are “disciplinary” and “population management” modes of power, which relate to the ideals, policies, and programmes that create systems of order that reward normalised behaviour at the expense of those whose experiences, identities, and abilities fail to meet the standards and expectations that are required to be viewed as a productive member of society (or one that is worthy of assistance). Understanding that disciplinary and population management modes of power have just as much, if not more, influence on outcomes, Spade argues “with the recognition that changing what the law explicitly says about a group comes a larger question about transformations that cannot occur through demands for legal recognition and inclusion” (p. 68).

This is of particular relevance to our discussion of risk and risk factors because many of the decisions that are made about child protection and welfare are inherently informed by these structures of power and their aim to create normalcy. The child welfare system uses systems of metrics-based evaluation and surveillance to determine the criteria for both receiving support and being the subject of correctional action. This inherently creates issues that stem from how indicators of concern are defined, particularly when they are built from disciplinary modes of power that fail to recognise non-white, non-Western, lower-class experiences as part of the acceptable norm. What results is a system with features of racial disproportionality and surveillance bias that continue to reinscribe precarity upon those that the system purports to support (Feely and Bosk 2021; Fong 2020; Purtell et al. 2021). When considering how this impacts recordkeeping, Hoyle et al. (2019) raise concerns about the fixity of information that gets recorded by these systems, noting “The ‘paper self’ created by a file may have serious impact on how people are subsequently treated and understood by others” (p. 1866). If decisions are informed by these structures, processes, and their static records, the reasons why we must interrogate and revise our trust in this system come to the fore.

Government itself, to some extent, is acknowledging that a risk assessment-based approach using its current measures is unsustainable, and there has been increased interest in involving strategies of child participation and co-design in child welfare practices as well as developing corresponding methodologies for approaching care that focus on trauma-informed, child-centred, strengths-based, and ethics-of-care-based practice.Footnote 4 But creating new measures and developing new philosophies for providing service, as I have already argued, will only lead to real change if the processes we use are somehow disrupted and revolutionised as well. There is evidence that shows that current government attempts to design and implement strategies that centre children’s voices and promote authentically caring practice are not successfully addressing the crux of the issue they aim to tackle. For example, children are currently being asked to participate in child welfare processes, but often in ways that are not meaningful to or for them (Collins et al. 2021; Diaz et al. 2018; Falch-Eriksen et al. 2021; Križ and Skivenes 2015; Littlechild 2000; Roesch-Marsh et al. 2017; Thomas and O’Kane 1999; Toros 2021; van Bijleveld et al. 2015; Woodman et al. 2023).

Additionally, when looking at these reforms through the lens of the experience of care workers, we are able to see another dimension in which systems are not yet fully accounting for the labour that goes into injecting these new processes and ideas into the system: workers are being asked to care, but acts of care are relegated to the invisible/informal aspects of their work. The idea of genuinely caring is part of what the social work profession aspires to, and yet it is consistently described as an act of going “above and beyond” because it is not something that is provided space or resources by the system (Antoni et al. 2023; Brown et al. 2019; Clark et al. 2023; Collins, 2022; Roberts et al. 2021; Wesley et al. 2020). Scott (2020) suggests that it is unrealistic to codify everything as procedure; writing, “By themselves, the simplified rules [of social organisation and production] can never generate a functioning community, city, or economy. Formal order, to be more explicit, is always and to some considerable degree parasitic on informal process, which the formal scheme does not recognise, without which it could not exist, and which it alone cannot create or maintain” (p. 312). In part, considering the need for relational experiences that are meaningful and individualised, it might be argued that care must be one of these informal processes. However, there are aspects of acknowledging care that must be recognised by the system even if the actual act of caring is left to the individual worker. Barnes (2012) points out that “emphasis on an ethic of care could help social workers to focus more on positive individual relationships with young people and on demonstrating that they care … In view of the limited resources social workers have, this would necessitate a challenge to the prevailing emphasis on the ever-increasing and time-consuming demand for accountability through computer and paper recording and on managing care in individual work with young people” (p. 1289). A full discussion of organisational citizenship behaviour, its relationship to the social work ethos, and the ways in which systems benefits from not compensating these supererogatory acts is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is worth noting that a culture of care that relegates caring to being “above and beyond” can directly lead to compassion fatigue (Clark et al. 2023, p. 967). If care becomes part of our recordkeeping infrastructure, how might this help shift this reality?

An example that holds promise? Considering the Te Toka Tūmoana Indigenous and Bicultural Wellbeing Principled Practice Framework and the kairāranga-a-whānau initiative

Although the introduction of this paper focused on positioning the UK’s concept of the corporate parent as disparate from other Commonwealth policies relating to the care and wellbeing of children, a relevant example of how a modern system may be showing some signs of success in integrating concepts of love and care into its practice can be found in the Te Toka Tūmoana Indigenous and Bicultural Wellbeing Principled Practice Framework of Aotearoa New Zealand. The framework was developed in collaboration with Māori communities “as the model for working with Māori as part of a wider effort to shift statutory social work in Aotearoa to a Māori-centred practice position” (Eruera et al. 2021, p. 8). The framework outlines the goal of “Processes and practice reflect tika, whākāpono (underpinning belief) and aroha (genuine empathy)” (Oranga Tamiriki 2019a). Particularly exciting in the context of the speculative imaginings of this paper is the explicit mention of records and their role in the process; guidance for when the policy should be used specifically states that “We must… evidence the application of Te Toka Tūmoana in case records” (Oranga Tamiriki 2019a).

Although identified as being “a seriously alternative model” due to its centring of Indigenous experiences and ways of knowing (Eruera et al. 2021, p. 6), the story of Te Toka Tūmoana is not that different from that of contemporary (as compared to idealised) corporate parenting or other approaches that have attempted to address issues in child welfare practice.Footnote 5 In detailing the events that led to an 2020 investigation on the removal of newborn children, the chief ombudsman for Aotearoa New Zealand found that “Limited case file recording makes it very difficult for me to be satisfied that the Ministry has ensured that, before executing the removal, the parents and whānau were provided with the opportunity for ngākau maharatanga me te ngākau aroha; a period of ‘quality time’ that reflects consideration, empathy, sympathy and love” (Boshier 2020, p. 189). Boshier’s phrasing of not feeling “satisfied” by the records available is a fascinating framing when considering the line of questioning of this paper. Not only does the report identify an absence of care in action, despite the Te Toka Tūmoana framework, but it specifically points to the recordkeeping practices of Oranga Tamiriki failing to even capture the potential of care having been enacted.

Despite the presence of the familiar issues that are present throughout Western child welfare systems, Oranga Tamiriki has been working to develop a cultural advocacy role, the kairāranga-a-whānau, that appears to so far be successful in capturing the spirit of Te Toka Tūmoana. In their work, kairāranga-a-whānau are tasked with “identifying and engaging significant whānau, hapū and iwi members in decision-making for their tamariki (as early as possible) [and] supporting and/or facilitating hui ā-whānau and assisting Oranga Tamariki staff to integrate appropriate cultural knowledge and practice into the decision-making processes, such as in the case consult etc.” (Oranga Tamiriki 2019b). In a report evaluating the initial pilot project, Love et al. (2019) found that the model was successful, resulting in “high levels of trust, engagement and satisfaction” and “positive outcomes for tamariki/whānau, their participation and their decision-making” (p. 4). They saw the principles of Te Toka Tūmoana being embodied throughout the work of the kairāranga-a-whānau and described it as being “driven by aspirations and aroha for tamariki and whānau, together with belief in the efficacy of whānau, hapū, iwi, hāpori systems, i.e. a Māori worldview” (p. 4). However, a question to be asked is whether Te Toka Tūmoana was a catalyst for this success, which would suggest that it might have implications for other initiatives to be able to develop systemic caring, or if other factors contributed to the success. Indeed, Love et al. (2019) found that “Kairāranga worked naturally within an Ao Māori, tikanga based framework” and that such a framework “naturally manifested” Te Toka Tūmoana (p. 4). One potential conclusion to be drawn from these findings is that the framework was not engendering care, but more that it was possible to identify the framework in already caring practice. Still, the success of kairāranga-a-whānau offers opportunities for the consideration of wider child protection practices:

  1. 1.

    The value of creating professional space for officers/agents/advocates whose role is specifically focused on caring practices. Love et al. (2019) discuss the issue of needing to continue to support authentic kairāranga-a-whānau as the programme expands and becomes integrated into the larger established institution (p. 6).

  2. 2.

    The opportunity to use the expertise and practices of specialised workers to inform, educate, and set standards for broader practice. In the context of recordkeeping, it might be particularly interesting to examine the documentary practices of kairāranga-a-whānau and attempt to identify if their processes as well as the composition of their records are different in a way that could inform case recording overall.

It is with this last point about the potential of kairāranga-a-whānau that I would like to begin thinking about playing with records as spaces where things are formally documented and where archival scholars are doing the work to consider what meaningful representation and participation mean, particularly through various new lenses of provenance.

Ideating and proposing the scenario

In our risk-based system as it is, traditional recordkeeping practices—assuming they are properly managed according to archival principles—produce the type of documentation that the government requires. If the focus is on evidence and accountability, traditional provenance has you covered. There is no reason, in this model of documentation and audit, that a new type of record needs to be produced. However, what happens when the government is being asked to care as a parent? In this speculated reality of actualised corporate parenting, each person who handles an aspect of a child’s case genuinely views them as their child. As a result, we should expect to see elements of family recordkeeping performed and enacted, both the good and the troubling. What might scholarship about the recordkeeping activities of parents tell us about what innate qualities might exist and what we might need to account for and address in our design of related materials and technologies? What follows is not an exhaustive exploration, but a sample of some of the approaches that imagining corporate parent recordkeeping might produce.

Potential result: The way that records are kept is less segmented and more open to holistic designs that recognise multiple points of activation and multiple voices that contribute to the record

Everly (2022) finds that parents’ motivations for recordkeeping include the preservation of memories for their children to review later in life as well as memory tools for themselves in both contemporary and future contexts. She shares a particularly illustrative example from her interviews where a parent “fluctuate[s] between speaking or writing to [their children] like they’re adults, and writing to them as they are right now” (Everly 2022, p. 35). As a parent, recordkeeping activities keep both the present and future of a child’s life in mind in a way that does not draw a hard line of distinction between the person that a child is and the person they will become, meaning that multiple types of activation of the record—a term borrowed from Ketelaar (2001) referring to “every interaction, intervention, interrogation, and interpretation by creator, user, and archivist” (p. 137)—are imagined and addressed as part of the creation process such that “the record begins to look less like a static translation of an event, and more like a dynamic and continually unfolding event in itself” (Everly 2022, p. 43). Records of parenting are open to the idea that records can be created to address the needs, concerns, and voices of multiple parties at once and that they will flow through stages of use that reflect these different perspectives. They aim to answer the questions that parents might ask of them, but also often project into the future to imagine what a child might want or need to know.

One of the hallmark issues of current out-of-home care practice is the ineffectiveness and lack of support for robust transitions out of care. In their report “Keep caring, Systemic inquiry into services for young people transitioning from out-of-home care,” the Victorian Commission for Children and Young People (2020) included a quote from a child protection practitioner who said: “The 15 + care and transition plan is very tokenistic. It’s a separate document meant to be targeted to leaving care, but it overlaps with the current case plan in Child Protection in terms of goals and tasks. Workers feel like they are repeating the work they have already done, just an extra administrative burden” (p. 197). If recordkeeping for child protection were to adopt the type of multi-dimensional, multi-temporality style of thinking that parents engage in with their recordkeeping practices, how might we envision a different approach to case plans and transition plans that would allow their documentary and planning functions to be considered in one? Might the interplay between the two feel more like relational acts of offering parental guidance and strategising for the future? Researchers in recordkeeping informatics and bioinformatics spaces have designed digital tools that reflect the recordkeeping needs and desires of children in and leaving care. Generally, these projects have a focus on the idea of these tools as being “personal” to the child—for example, Dexheimer et al. (2019) engaged in the design of a personal health record and Rolan et al. (2020a) developed a prototype for a personal recordkeeping registry—creating interplay between the ‘official’ system and the designed system, but for the most part respecting the idea of a boundary between the two. In a world where the corporate parent envisions creating records for their purposes as parent and for the purposes of their children, these systems might become natural to how records are created and, rather than being their own ecosystems mostly for the child’s benefit, would come to be viewed as integral parts of the recordkeeping process.

Douglas and Alisauskas (2021) also explore motivations of parental recordkeeping and have proposed the idea of recordkeeping as a form of parenting and an act of love, describing how “Unable to perform the usual parenting roles associated with caring for a living child, [bereaved] parents described making, organizing, and caring for records as something they could do” (p. 26). This conceptualisation of recordkeeping, though focused on children who have passed, is worth considering in relation to children who are living as well. Records help to make relationships tangible and the acts of records creation and archivalizationFootnote 6 in the context of parenting are informed by a parent’s desire to provide and demonstrate care and love. In addition to impacting what is created and preserved, it is likely that this impacts how a parent might approach responding to the prompts that a document’s form might provide.

O’Neill et al. (2012) describe the unfeeling nature of care records, which offers insight into how documentation is typically approached:

“The use of ward numbers rather than names, the miniscule amount of information recorded about a child living in a Home for years and years–all these features of the records speak volumes about how the system saw the children in its ‘care’. The records are artefacts of the child welfare system’s particular ‘regime of truth’, which determines what is recorded, what is absent, what is deemed important and what is ignored” (p. 33).

How do parents engage in a different regime of truth in their recordkeeping? If, instead of professional duty, what is deemed important is centred on celebrating the child and capturing the level of care and love that is held for them, what would change about the authorial voice captured in the records?

Potential result: Liberatory parenting practices inform initiatives for increased recordkeeping literacy and the considerations of ability of the child to understand and navigate the recordkeeping landscape. Footnote 7

What might we learn from parent–child relationships about some of the potential pitfalls that a parental recordkeeping approach might surface? In my previous work with transracial, transnational adoptees, the dynamics of parent–child relationships presented several interesting topics relating to access that we might learn from in order to imagine the ideal approach of the government parent. In particular, I’d like to focus on two themes that emerged which are highly relevant to thinking about what the ideal balance might look like in the out-of-home care space:

  1. 1.

    records awareness—the awareness that adoptive parents have of the uses and value of records and if and how they help their children to gain similar awareness; oftentimes there is very little transference of awareness, which can lead to adoptees not realising the value of their records or even knowing that they exist (Ballin 2022, pp. 83–86)

  2. 2.

    shared senses of ownership and custody—records are both about a parent’s experiences and their child’s experiences (Ballin 2022, pp. 88–90).

In general, the experiences of the adoptees I spoke with described parent–child relationships in relation to records as being quite passive (as opposed to proactive), waiting for children—often on the cusp of adulthood—to initiate asking questions about their histories to present them with the opportunity to learn about the existence of records documenting their adoption and the information they contain. The passive nature of this approach can be seen as potentially problematic when adopting the proposition that children have the right to know what is documented about them and what the implications of that documentation are, including the control that parents hold over access to and interpretations of these materials (as proposed in work such as Golding et al. 2021 and Lomas et al. 2022). Raible (2012) contextualises these experiences through the lens of adultism:

Under adultism, adults get to decide the fate of the young simply because they are adults. … Despite sentimental views of the family in many societies and even though genuinely loving relationships do exist between many parents and kids, children and adults are frequently at odds due to adult power and authority… Adultism is perpetuated throughout the system of adoption, since the various uses of adoption center on adult concerns, rather than on what adoptees (of any age) say they want and need (pp. 91; 93-94).

Raible’s solution is to call for parents to act as allies and “work to share power” with adoptees, even in childhood (p. 135). In the context of records of adoption, this might look like moving beyond unspoken, yet open access to records to instead focusing on adoptive parents intentionally creating opportunities for their children to participate in the cultivation and activation of records of their adoptions.

How does this translate into our imagined child welfare practice? The theme of records awareness directly complements some of the issues highlighted in analysis of the steps towards democratising the out-of-home care recordkeeping system made in the Charter of Lifelong Rights in Childhood Recordkeeping in Out of Home Care (henceforth ‘the Charter’). In particular, the Charter proposes that we must consider “Disclosure rights [of children] relating to:

  • Knowing and being informed of where your records are held, including restricted files

  • Being informed about the type(s) of records held about you;

  • Being informed of when and why others are given access to your records;

  • Knowing when and why records about you are destroyed”

(Reed 2021a, p. 15).

As part of providing for these rights, the Charter calls for the creation of “an explainer in age-appropriate language” that helps children to understand the complex web of recordkeeping about their care (Reed et al. 2021b, p. 2). This is directly in contrast to current practice in which children are often expected to engage and manage their existence within these systems (sometimes barely navigable by adults themselves) and advocate for themselves with adult-level maturity through mechanisms of adultification (Davis 2022) and the premature conferral of adult status (Samuels and Pryce 2008). Indeed, when children are given access to archival spaces, expectations of the space “oftentimes [force] the child to act more like an adult than is necessary” (Carbajal 2022).

If child welfare systems were to adopt a simultaneously anti-adultification and anti-adultism approach that actively sought to cultivate children’s recordkeeping literacy, how would care experienced children be better equipped by their corporate parents to understand and navigate the system and its recordkeeping in a manner that doesn’t require them to act like an adult to do so? How might we design systems differently if our orientation were that we need to be able to explain and empower children to navigate them? One possible result from this thread of thinking would relate to the (re)design of educational tools that inform child welfare workers’ understanding of record and recordkeeping as well as their role in developing the recordkeeping literacy of those they serve. Nicholls (2018) has presented compelling arguments regarding borrowing the concept of information literacy from research and practice in early childhood education to help conceptualise goals for the general public’s understanding of recordkeeping practices. In the context of thinking of the recordkeeper as parent, our educational practices could benefit from drawing even more from the ECE space, considering the applicability of ways in which teachers, librarians, and other early childhood education professionals educate parents so that they are able to support their children’s literacy while simultaneously heightening their understanding of literacy and educational strategies overall (Carroll et al. 2019; Grolig 2020; Hume et al. 2015).

With regard to shared ownership and custody, in addition to the Charter and related literature on the recordkeeping rights of children, there is opportunity to draw from adjacent work in the realm of Indigenous data sovereignty. Prehn and Walter (2023) have called upon social work and the child protection system “to go a step further [than recognising Indigenous data sovereignty] by including [Indigenous data governance] at the data conceptualisation phase. This is because once the data are already collected, the ability to ask the types of questions Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people need answers to is limited. Having [both Indigenous data sovereignty and governance] embedded in the child protection system begins to change the data landscape to meet the needs of Indigenous people, their families, and their communities” (p. 375). This has significant implications for recordkeeping: as is noted by Rolan et al. (2020b), “even when recognised, sovereignty and rights mandates are unworkable without information systems that recognise competing claims to data sovereignties and support their arbitration” (p. 6). Recognising that these two areas of focus overlap both directly—there is a significant movement towards Indigenous-designed-and led child welfare services and programmes (Paki Paki et al. 2023)—and indirectly through shared desires and concerns relating to continued consent, access control, decision making power, and active participation and representation in records (Carbone et al., 2021; McKemmish et al. 2020; Thorpe et al. 2021).

Lilley et al. (2024) identify the concept of kotahitanga—a Māori term meaning "unity, solidarity, or working as a collective unit for the benefit of all..." which "recognizes that different individuals (or groups) will have skills, and experience that assist in solving problems or developing solutions” (p. 9)—as key to successfully implementing Māori data sovereignty in the government sector. This concept might be a useful way to reflect on relationally that is integral, too, to efforts to improve child welfare systems. In a world of caring corporate parenting, different professions that contribute to the network that makes up the corporate parent will have to work together to fashion new systems that not only collectively develop a sense of care and respect for children, but they will also need to work together with children to ensure that their voices are heard, represented, and celebrated in records and beyond.

Characterising parental recordkeeping


It would be remiss of me to engage in this work without acknowledging the fact that there is no singular approach to the recordkeeping that parents and families engage in. Indeed, where corporate archival structures codify their retention and disposition of materials based on legal and societal mandates, decisions about when and whether records are made and kept in the familial realm are rooted in the experiences and perceptions of individual people. Piggott (2023) provides a variety of examples of different motivations that result in the culling of the materials that make up the body of family records and muses, “we must acknowledge the psychological provenance inevitably present when culling is in mind. All kinds of situations can readily be imagined. Motivations can be as simple as parents not wanting inherited family material to be a burden to their children – itself sometimes a convenient rationalization” (p. 21). It is in this acknowledgement of the diversity of family makeup and recordkeeping practices that we might return to the corporate aspect of the corporate parent. Where parents can make decisions about their children based on their personal philosophies, corporate parents must come together under a shared philosophy that may or may not match what an individual agent acting as corporate parent might practise in their home. Establishing and respecting rules and workflows for how the recordkeeping practices of caring corporate parenting are key to ensuring that the responsibilities of government to act as a caring corporate parent are being fulfilled. It is here where we might return to the positive potential of auditing and oversight practices—as Evans et al. (2024) argue, “Without systemic and dynamic oversight mechanisms we leave those with Care experiences to pursue individual outcomes [relating to their rights in recordkeeping] against significant bureaucratic odds.” Although it has not been the focus of this paper, part of the significant issues that have been identified by commissioned audits have been that recordkeeping and information sharing requirements, even in their present state as predominantly responding to bureaucratic functions, are not consistently being met (see, for example, Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman 2020; Poutasi 2022; Victorian Auditor-General’s Office 2022). Addressing these pitfalls through the development of oversight measures that effectively monitor recordkeeping activities in real-time—rather than waiting to address them during an inquiry cycle—is an additional challenge that must be met if the system is to adequately address its problems.

Materialising the scenario for audience provocation

Engaging in speculative processes to introduce expanded notions of archival provenance and practice to child welfare recordkeeping begins to illustrate how these concepts could create recordkeeping tools that support the integration of an ethos of corporate parenting into the care system. Government policy, if left to its own devices, will continue to perpetuate the inquiry ouroboros and the systems that continually fail to provide children with adequate care and support. Nearly ten years after publication, the warning of Evans et al. (2015) that “Unless the archival community embraces archival activism and archival autonomy as a grand societal challenge, then the inquires, the apologies, the battle for funds to adequately resource responses will continue” still rings true (p. 359). Embracing archival activism means taking the lessons that we can and have learned from examining our own contributions to institutional bodies and duties and enacting change to ensure that the mindset around recordkeeping—and the mindset around the processes that recordkeeping helps to document—reflects the transformations we know need to occur systemwide.

In 1995, Duranti lamented that “the easiness of electronic records creation [along with some additional factors] … [has] produced the sloppiest records creation ever in the history of record making” (p 9). Rather than invest our energy in working to make these poorly formed records better, “we should be concerned with ensuring the creation of reliable records. How can this be done? By establishing the most appropriate record forms for each type of action and defining its elements, by determining step-by-step controlled records creation procedures, and by assigning responsibilities for the creation of each record” (Duranti 1995, p 9). Where reliability was the focus of this proposal, I argue that this method is transferrable to discussions of respect and care. We should be concerned with ensuring the creation of caring records. How can this be done? By working to incorporate the lessons of the epistemological turn that have led us to centre care, affect, and relationality in our considerations of provenance and purpose into the integral procedures and processes that lay the groundwork for our most uncaring of recordkeeping environments.

Leaning into speculation and designing records and processes of the future holds potential to break the inquiry ouroboros, which only pays attention to recordkeeping to the extent that it aims to focus on patching holes in extant systems. Engaging in codesign processes with care workers and care experienced children and young people to produce provocations that could then be brought to government for their consideration allows us to imagine and advocate for change beyond the philosophical on a timeline that rejects waiting for wider attention to cycle back around.

I have thus far illustrated some ideas that could inform what speculative design initiatives could look like, but what comes next—the materialisation phase—has near infinite number of directions that could be pursued. What follows is an example of the type of project design work that I have personally begun in pursuit of materialising a new reality inspired by speculative and radical embracing of corporate parenting in recordkeeping. I am still in the initial phases of this research, but am sharing the initial scaffolding of the work as a concluding provocation for others to take up acts of speculative design in pursuit of child-centred recordkeeping.

Through my PhD research, I am planning to contribute to our collective effort to invest in these processes through the examination of the lens of data governance, working to co-create a model for child consent in the creation of datasets that are built from the extraction of child protection records. Currently, the use of child protection records in research is overseen by ethics reviews conducted by both the researcher’s institution and the institution that holds the materials. That said, however ethical the redaction and random sampling processes are, there are no current mechanisms for informing the child whose data are being acquired that it is going to be or has been used, nor are there mechanisms for directly asking for informed assent or consent that this information be used.Footnote 8 We have seen from archival research and from care leaver advocacy that records fail to do right by children in not respecting or capturing their voice and experiences, and the use of these materials in research in this manner is another way in which we do not currently address the agency of children and their right to know what is being done with their information. Asking for permission is not “necessary” by ethics board standards if the right precautions are taken,Footnote 9 but it is the right thing to do if we are going to move forward with a model of recordkeeping and of child welfare and protection that aims to uphold and prioritise the rights of children.

The status quo of child protection data extraction for research purposes needs to be disrupted. Hayes & Devaney (2004) surfaced many of the issues that researchers must consider when embarking on incorporating this method into their work, but to date, there do not seem to be existing mechanisms for addressing these issues that do not rely on the ethics and professionalism of the researchers and how they manifest in their research design. We are 20 years on from the publication of that article. Witte (2020) offers an updated discussion of current practice, but the reality is that very little—if anything—has changed. How, then, might a focus on this issue from a recordkeeping design and governance perspective help us to overcome the inertia that has prevented the research community from making progress towards child-centred data practices in this area? If it is possible from a recordkeeping perspective to design a method for embedding practices that allow a child to be better informed and heard in relation to the extraction and use of their data in records, might we be able to argue that the integration of such activities into the workflow of research is not just an “ethical complexit[y that] remain[s] to be grappled with” at some point in the future, but a problem that we set to addressing in the here and now (p. 2915)? And if so, is this an example of recordkeeping driving an opportunity for the corporate parent to engage in the liberatory parenting practices that were discussed earlier in the proposal of our speculative design scenario?

Designing this type of workflow might seem like putting the cart before the horse. If we are not holistically and authentically prioritising the child’s voice in child protection work in general, shouldn’t we wait to address research data extraction? In my mind, through looking at the history of child welfare reform over the past half century as I have done in this paper, it might be argued that we have focused too intently on changing philosophy without developing significant changes to our infrastructure that make new ways of approaching child welfare a reality. The work that I am doing aims to serve as a provocation for not only the archival community but the wider out-of-home care sector to begin to believe that recordkeeping practices can not only reflect change but engender it.

Thinking about data extraction in this manner is just one small piece of a very large and complex puzzle. The potential results that are speculated upon in this paper are not the only possibilities of how conceptualisations of provenance and archival theory and practice more broadly might inspire change in the out-of-home care system and beyond, particularly when we consider the ever-looming presence of AI, automation, and datafication in digital recordkeeping spaces. But corporate parenting is a shared responsibility, and so too is the challenge of making corporate parenting possible. My speculation and its results will only ever be one small portion of the speculation that the archives and recordkeeping profession can engage in, which is one portion of the collective work of the out-of-home care sector. If we are to take up the provocation presented in this paper that recordkeeping is not just the tool to record already changed practice but the mechanism through which we can initiate such changes, we must engage in further speculation together to envision what the new world of expanded provenance and the technologies that respect it will look like. If we lean into designing and making changes that centre care in this hypothetical manner that enables us to dream big, I believe that the changes we make to recordkeeping practice will make the difference in our real world, too.