The costs and outcomes of child welfare interventions: extending the Cost Calculator to include cost calculations for all children in need
Core funding from Department for Children, Schools and Families (previously the Department for Education and Skills).
Spiralling costs together with evidence of unsatisfactory outcomes for children’s services have led to an urgent need to introduce greater transparency into the relationship between costs and outcomes of child welfare services.
The Cost Calculator for Children's Services (CCfCS) was developed as part of the CCFR research project: Costs and Consequences of Different Types of Childcare Provision.
It is a computer application and costing methodology designed to assist local authorities and other agencies to monitor the true costs of services to children and to link these to outcomes.
The main aim of this project is to extend the capacity of the current version of the Cost Calculator to cover costs to all children in need in receipt of family support services and to include costs incurred to health, education, youth justice, and the courts, and enable them to be calculated in a comparable manner.
The ultimate objective of our work on the CCfCS is to make it possible for agencies to compare the full cost to the public purse incurred over time by children with different levels of need, and to relate these to outcomes.
The Cost Calculator will be implemented in four participating authorities will be developed further to include improved outcomes variables and improved unit costs for adoption and education costs.
We will map the range of targeted and specialist services offered to children supported in their families and living independently in 15 local authorities and calculate unit costs for those services that are most frequently available and/or take up the larger proportions of the budget.
These improved and new unit costs will be incorporated into the Cost Calculator and trialled in the four participating authorities.
The researchers have completed a mapping exercise which sought to identify which services were most commonly accessed by children in need, their relative cost, and which could be most usefully included in calculations.
Fifteen local authorities participated by identifying the services that they solely or jointly funded or commissioned to support those children identified as being in need under section 17 of the Children Act (1989). They were asked to categorise each service by the Every Child Matters outcomes and explain the funding, nature and delivery of the service.
- The research has so far revealed the ‘core’ services which were most commonly cited and which take up the largest
proportion of the children’s services budget.
- Case management teams’ whereby social care
professionals manage the day to day needs of a case were defined as a core service.
- ‘Additional services’ such as groups or interventions aimed at addressing specific needs were also identified.
The research team have begun more detailed work in four
authorities in which the Cost Calculator is being implemented, to calculate unit costs for the core services identified in the mapping exercise. These additional variables and unit costs will be added to the Cost Calculator as well as the costs incurred by education processes and services developed as part of the separate
project
The revised version will be piloted with selected data on a
sample of 240 children in need followed for up to twelve months in the four authorities. The team will identify with local authority managers how the calculations can be used in the planning, commissioning and delivery of services.
Research and development of the Cost Calculator for Children’s Services will help improve outcomes for children’s services across the 'Every Child Matters' framework and contribute to improving the evidence base for procurement and commissioning services.
It will also help develop and evaluate children’s services departments and inform the development of the Integrated Children’s System and the e-government agenda .
McDermid, S. (2008) Extending the Cost Calculator for all
Children in Need. Mapping services for children in need and identifying child level data for those services. CCFR Evidence issue 12 . Loughborough: CCFR.
Ward, H., Holmes, L., Dyson, P., McDermid, S. and Scott, J. (Forthcoming 2008) The Costs and Outcomes of Child Welfare Interventions: Mapping Children in Need Services. Report to the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Loughborough: CCFR.
Lisa Holmes
Samantha McDermid
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