Valuing changes in welfare to individuals and society resulting from the government's provision of children's social services in England
Department for Education and Skills
The principal aim of Children’s Social Services (CSS) is to support vulnerable children, help them fulfil their potential and enable them to live independent adult lives. The primary focus of this study is on measuring the output generated by CSS and identifying indicators that capture whether the overall goals are achieved.
This study aimed to obtain a measure of the economic activity generated by CSS interventions that is suitable for inclusion in the UK National Accounts, and to build on improvements already achieved by: investigating alternative activity indicators; seeking measures that represent the full range of CSS activities; relating the activity indicators to the Every Child Matters (ECM) outcomes framework; and exploring the use of Performance Assessment Framework (PAF) indicators for quality adjustment.
Activities were undertaken in two phases. Phase one involved:
- Literature analysis exploring evidence on types of service provision, the outcomes that CSS activities achieve and the measuring instruments used in the studies.
- Mapping exercise which identified thirty three very varied CSS interventions, and related them to the Every Child Matters (ECM) outcome areas.
Phase 2 involved:
- Activity indicators, and their use together with expenditure or unit cost data in the construction of an index, formed the second phase of this study.
- Consultation with three local authorities about the appropriateness of potential indicators and the availability of data , taking into consideration the data that is available from their Management Information Systems, and its completeness and reliability.
- Review of data sources available.
- Although the measurable indicators of activity available in existing data collections relate to only a small subset of CSS activities, they do describe the output of core interventions that account for the major part of expenditure.
- It is recommended that the four current activity indicators for looked after children should continue to be used in the index and that four additional activity indicators should be added: hours of service provided to children supported in their families and independently; number of core assessments completed; number of children of adopted; and number of care leavers.
- The aggregate volume measures that relate to LAC should be adjusted by aggregate quality. Trial indices have been calculated using different combinations of indicators, including the use of a quality adjustment index, and the indices have been compared with the existing CSS indicator. Growth in the new index is somewhat slower than that of the existing index unless the quality adjustment is included, in which case it grows at a very similar rate. The new index improves on the existing measure by capturing 60% of the value of CSS output in activity measures, as compared with 44% in the current index.
- Further improvements are still needed. Nine principles are proposed that should guide the future measurement of CSS output. One of these relates to multi-agency working, which was identified as important for achieving the ECM outcomes. Its development also seems likely to lead to greater sharing of database information that could provide relevant data for CSS output indicators and so the problems it presents for national income accounting should be addressed. Consideration should be given as to how to attribute changes in output to the different agencies of CSS, health, education and law enforcement.
- Thirty one specific recommendations for improving the CSS index are also made. Eleven of these relate to changes in the indicators used in the index; four are about the weights that should be used to combine the indicators; two are concerned with quality adjustment. The remaining 14 are to do with changes to data collections, since more and better differentiated data is needed if the index is to be improved further.
- Two examples of the recommendations made are: the replacement CiN census should be collected annually, based on the SSDA 903 approach and developed in consultation with local authorities to ensure its demands are least burdensome; local authorities should be required to submit information from the ICS on developmental progress at an individual child level so that it can be linked with data about the interventions that children have received.
- The vision for the future is of a joined-up approach to data collection which will generate activity, outcome and expenditure indicators for each of the 33 service types identified, and ideally for separate activities within the major service types. The ultimate aim is to have outcomes data at the individual child-level for looked after children and those supported in their families and independently, linked to specific interventions for which duration and cost data is available, with information on the contributions of different agencies to service delivery.
Immediate improvements can be made to the Children’s Social Services output measure, including broadening the coverage of services for which output is measured directly and accounting for change in the quality of services over time. Furthermore, the mapping of 33 CSS activities that has been drawn up forms a framework for further improvement to the index in the future.
Jean Soper, Lisa Holmes, Xiaozhen Hu and Enliz D'Souza
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