This paper throws light on the range and depth of professional interventions employed towards immigrant children and their families during the constitutive years of the English welfare state. According to Jordanna Bailkin “(…) the distinctive form of welfare [in England] that took shape in the 1950s and 1960s – most notably in the domains of mental health, education, child welfare, and criminal law – were shaped by decolonization and its perceived demands.” (Bailkin 2012: 1f.).

Due to its influential impact in the English immigrant education space and because of its extensive education archive the paper uses the Birmingham Local Education Administration (LEA) as an empirical and historical case (Grosvenor & Roberts 2013, Grosvenor 1997, Smith & Sutcliffe 1974).

The significant British Nationality Act of 1948 and the Immigration Act of 1971 serve as demarcations of the period treated.

Theoretically the paper explores Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant’s concept of state-crafting, which enables professional interventions to be viewed as expressions of governing adding something to a state logic (Moldenhawer & Øland 2013). The key question is who (institutions and agents) wants to do something on behalf of the collective.

The explicit research questions of the paper are:

• How did the immigrant child disturb the educational field and the practice in Birmingham?
• Which configuration of professionals is in evidence and how can the space in which they operated be understood?
• How are immigrant children, their parents, and their homes described in professional records?
• Which and whose perceptions of normality are evident in these descriptions?
• To which extent and to what ends were these descriptions used to justify and legitimize interventions vis-à-vis immigrant children and their families within the jurisdiction of the Birmingham Local Education Administration?
• Who would benefit from the interventions?

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