CYP Now - Resources: Review - Measuring effectiveness of spending

This is a timely publication on a subject at the heart of the challenges facing commissioners. It has its roots in the concern that rising costs in social care need to be researched in the context of the effectiveness of spending, and that this needs to be expressed in terms of outcomes. So although some of the studies looked at pre-date Every Child Matters, the book contains results relevant to that agenda.

Costs have been examined for both units of children's social careservices and whole social care processes. Many approaches have beentaken, and anyone wishing to draw specific conclusions is encouraged toseek out the full details of the relevant study.

One of the overarching conclusions, however, is that decisions on publicspending are being made with poor evidence. In fact, the quality ofinformation available to researchers was often poor. This wasparticularly the case when accessing case file information, and one ofthe authors' first suggestions is that action is taken to improve thisevidence base.

This resonates with the PricewaterhouseCoopers report on children'shomes and fostering, which was put together for the Department forEducation and Skills last October. That report also suggested therecould be merit in looking at whether more refined means of assessmentwould enable us to track the correlation between variables andoutcomes.

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