Using assessment data to improve outcomes in children’s social care: Why haven’t we got it right so far?
The decisions made in the daily work of providing children’s social care, and shaping its future, are as impactful on the lives of vulnerable children and young people those decisions made in doctors surgeries, hospitals and operating theatres. In areas such as health and medicine, we would be horrified if the decisions and recommendations made by the likes of nurses, doctors, psychiatrists and surgeons weren’t backed up by research and proven by a robust hierarchy of evidence. We’d be equally horrified if there was not a system in place through which the impact of our treatments, interventions and medications can be continually observed, monitored and improved. This is how our society gets better at saving and improving lives, and is how as individuals and families we are able to trust the systems that provide our care.
Yet in children’s social care in the UK, research regularly cites long-standing, systemic problems in assessing the needs, risks and strengths of children in a consistent way and over time. This impacts children’s lives when decisions about their care are hard to make, placing unreasonable pressure on even the most experienced practitioners and social workers. It impacts our services as we lack the tools to ensure that individual needs are effectively communicated between a complex mix of agencies, or to demonstrate the impact of our services. It holds back the work of commissioners and policymakers, because without a universal approach assessment, no reliable evidence base can be built in order to guide our service developments and improvements into the future.
Perhaps because of this, the children’s social care sector does not benefit from a culture of sharing and learning from data to improve our collective impact. Our local authorities and care providers do their best to implement systems of assessment and analysis of data, often at great cost, but too often these processes happen in siloes, and are too costly to have a sustainable impact. As a sector, we’re simply not working with a shared child-centred vision, because we do not have the tools to do so. Unless that changes, we will not do the best we can for the children and families who need us now, and will need us in the future.
It now is almost five years since the Department for Education made the following statement in their report, Putting Children First: ….
“The relentless pursuit of excellent practice across the system will depend on high quality data being shared and used. At a national level, data should inform policy and legislation about children’s social care; help us target support and challenge to local areas; and facilitate local learning. At a local level, data can ensure that the need for help is identified early; resources are targeted appropriately; services are commissioned effectively and efficiently; risk is managed well; and the right support is put in place for children and their families.”
“Too often, data are used primarily to try to indicate good or bad performance at specific intervals, rather than to identify opportunities to improve outcomes for children on an ongoing basis. Leaders and practitioners report that the way we share data does not always meet their needs and that local authorities can lack the tools, and capacity to fully utilise data to improve practice and outcomes for children.”
TCOM England is the solution to this problem. It’s accessible and affordable to all local authorities and providers. It enables a shared vision and collaborative approach, a proven, ‘universal’ assessment strategy designed for use throughout the care system, and makes possible a new generation of software that will enable professionals to access meaningful insights from shared data in real- time at the click of a mouse, to guide decision-making from practice to management. With TCOM England, our sector is stronger together, By uniting in this approach we will improve decision-making, service development, evidence and most importantly, outcomes for the children, young people and families who need us most.
TCOM England is a collaborative initiative providing universal and comprehensive assessment, decision-support and outcome monitoring tools for local authorities and care providers in England.
