Using a child development model to assess the outcomes of social work interventions with families

The Children Act 1989 strengthens the view that the purpose of providing children's welfare services is to support families in promoting their satisfactory development. Implementation of the Looking After Children materials provides data that enables us to assess how far such aims are achieved both for individual children and for groups. Concrete information in each of the key areas of need, threshold, objective, service and progress across seven dimensions of development can be built up to provide complex assessments of outcome. Extending such assessments beyond the group of children looked after away from home raises questions about public responsibilities to families.