Så nära, men ändå så långt ifrån : En kvalitativ studie om lärares och socialsekreterares beskrivningar av samverkan

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study was to investigate and analyse how professionals within school and social services experience collaboration between them when working with children and youth who are abused or are thought to be at risk of being abused. Furthermore, the intention was to illustrate which factors that teachers and social workers consider to be successful for collaboration, and how they consider that the existing law of confidentiality affects the collaboration. Qualitative interviews with six respondents were conducted, three teachers and three social workers. The six respondents who took part in the study worked in two different municipalities of different sizes. This enabled us to make comparisons between smaller and bigger municipalities. The content of the interviews was coded and analysed using a thematic analysis. The ecological systems theory was applied during the process of the thematic analysis, to create an understanding around how different systems affect the child’s development. The result of the study illustrates which factors teachers and social workers, who work with youths, experience are critical for success, although it also emerges what they experience to be obstacles to collaboration and how they would like to change the collaboration. All the respondents’ raised that collaboration was facilitated by having personal relationships to the professionals they were collaborating with, since this benefited communication and trust. Moreover, the respondents brought up that collaboration is more easily accomplished in smaller municipalities, since this can make it easier to establish personal relationships between different professionals. Furthermore, the teachers experience the law of confidentiality as very frustrating, they argued that it restricted their work since it stopped them from getting information about the particular student and the support the student was gaining from the social services. Lastly, it emerged that all respondents wish for a closer connection between school and social services, but several respondents express that it is not possible due to insufficient resources.