Outcomes in children’s social care

This article considers how to understand and measure outcomes in Children’s Social Care. Even a cursory acquaintance with the work of Children’s Social Care is sufficient to highlight the fact that while talk of “outcomes” and how to improve them is ubiquitous, deciding on appropriate outcomes is fraught with challenge (La Valle et al, 2016). The first section of the article considers two key challenges for deciding on outcomes, namely the sheer variety of the work and the question of who decides which outcomes should be measured. The middle section briefly outlines an approach to measuring outcomes, and the quality of social work practice, that we used in recent studies. It then considers lessons from these studies. The concluding section argues that a simplistic approach to outcomes is unhelpful, and that a more nuanced approach needs to include greater clarity about the purpose and nature of Children’s Social Care in the United Kingdom (and other countries) and as a result a wider range of outcome measures