Facilitators and Barriers of Effective Interprofessional Collaboration between Child Welfare and School Professionals

Children and youth in foster care experience poor K-12 educational outcomes compared to their peers without foster care histories. Child welfare and school professionals hold shared responsibility for ensuring their educational well-being based on federal policies and role expectations. However, professionals often experience challenges in effectively collaborating with one another to support the educational of children and youth in foster care. Guided by ecological systems and critical theory, this mixed methods explanatory sequential design explored the facilitators and barriers that child welfare professionals, school professionals, and professional caregivers viewed as promoting and hindering effective interprofessional collaboration between child welfare and school professionals. The quantitative phase involved the analysis of surveys (N = 136) collected from child welfare professionals, school professionals, and professional caregivers in an urban county in the Southwest. In the qualitative phase, interviews and focus groups were conducted with a subsample of survey participants (N = 22). Facilitators of interprofessional collaboration included: centering the best interests of the child, opportunities and capacity to meaningfully engage, effective communication, positive and trusting relationships, being knowledgeable about the child, policies, roles, and systems, and empathy towards other professionals. Barriers of interprofessional collaboration included: competing priorities or agendas, unmanageable workloads and limited time, little to no timely communication, weak ties and mistrust, limited knowledge about the child, policies, roles, and systems, and biases towards professional caregivers and other professionals. The overall findings have multiple implications for social work practice, policy, research, and education to enhance collaboration between professionals to better serve children and youth in foster care.