Understanding Costs And Outcomes In Child Welfare Services

Today's child welfare services operate under a limited supply of resources. This book explains how finite resources can be used most effectively, providing social work managers and policymakers with a comprehensive costing model to assess the links between needs, costs and outcomes across the full range of child welfare services.

This text presents the findings of a set of original research studies and reports on the way that care services for children are delivered, the cost of providing services and the extent to which they improve outcomes for children. It also looks at services provided by the statutory, and examines how resources are distributed.

Every day, social service agencies collect millions of pieces of data about the children and families they serve. Agencies depend on this data to inform decision-making by personnel throughout the organization and to provide meaningful research and evaluation on program effectiveness and outcomes. As capacity for collecting and utilizing data has increased so has the recognition that this data can and should be used more broadly. Further, it should include not just single-system data, but data across different human service agencies. Administrative/big data systems can be powerful tools in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of public child welfare services. Understanding, harnessing, and using big data holds tremendous promise in creating transformative change in the social services. Data analytics and data mining can lead to a better understanding of what services work for specific populations (targeting and predictive modelling), provide a more nuanced understanding of service outcomes for the workforce and major stakeholders (transparency), and facilitate collaboration across existing service delivery silos to reduce duplication of services and enhance consumer access to services (efficiency). This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Public Child Welfare.

It costs more to place a child in the care of a local authority than it does to send a child to a top boarding school, and there are substantial variations in costs both between and within authorities. This book gets to the bottom of the costs of care and provides an insight into how these variations in cost relate to differences in children's needs, and most importantly, whether higher costs reflect better services and better outcomes for children. Costs and Consequences for Children Placed Away from Home draws from new original research, and considers the implications for best practice and future policy. It also features information about a newly pioneered resource: a fully workable decision analysis model designed for use in local authorities which uses historical data for each child to calculate the probable cost consequences of difference placement choices. This book sheds light on how to calculate the financial and social costs of care, and will be invaluable to both social work managers and policy makers working in children's services.