Proposals signal end to timescales for assessing vulnerable children

The government has set in motion its ambition to scrap national timescales for assessing vulnerable children, as recommended in Professor Eileen Munro’s review of child protection.

The consultation and draft guidance, Managing Individual Cases: the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families, proposes to end the 10-day and 35-day targets for completing initial and core assessments respectively. Children and families will instead receive one assessment within timescales set at a local level, according to the needs of the child.

The move has been broadly welcomed by social workers. Helga Pile, Unison’s national officer for social work, argues current timescales are unpopular.

“Social workers have told us of a tyranny of timescales that dictate their work,” says Pile. “Assessments are being rushed to meet the deadline, or more straightforward cases are being left as the deadline is still a number of days away.”

But behind the “potentially positive step” lies the challenge of changing entrenched cultural norms. “These timescales are embedded into social work and the management culture,” Pile explains. “The government wants to see the judgment of professionals trusted more, but it will require strong leadership to ensure that happens.”

British Association of Social Workers professional officer Nushra Mansuri echoes these concerns, fearing that councils may stick with the timescales they are familiar with, or fail to offer sufficient leadership.

“What should not happen is that social workers are told to go away, set their own timescales and do these assessments on their own without any help,” she says.

Eight areas have already been trialling the removal of the national timescales since last September and an evaluation report into the findings of these pilots is expected imminently.

New targets
In the London Borough of Islington, one of the pilot sites, the authority has imposed a 10-day target in which social workers must meet families. If an assessment is not completed within 45 days of this meeting, a manager reviews the case to establish whether more time is needed or if it is being unnecessarily delayed.

As a result, Islington has seen a reduction in the number of open cases, in which social work intervention is still needed.

Lucie Heyes, Islington social work reform programme manager and College of Social Work spokeswoman, says: “Because staff are not worried about getting a report written up by a certain date, they are focusing more on the family, getting support to them much quicker and spending time building a relationship with them.”

However, a less positive initial finding is that the new system has caused delays. During the first three months of the pilot, a quarter of all assessments took around 70 days. Of those that took longer than the 45 days expected by the council, 10 per cent were for justifiable reasons, such as cases involving unborn babies, but 15 per cent were labelled as “drift”.

Heyes says that once this was revealed, the council stepped up its monitoring and supervision of cases. In the following three months, the proportion of delayed cases fell to six per cent.

The evaluation report into the experiences of Islington and the other pilot areas will provide further details as to how the government’s draft guidance could improve the quality of social work with children and families.

But there is still concern about the lack of robust evidence on needs assessments and timescales.

Mansuri says: “There will be a number of different models councils could use. But which ones are effective and which ones aren’t? There is a real lack of good guidance around this.”