Ethics review of machine learning in children’s social care

There could not be a more important time to think about the role that ethics should play in the context of using machine learning (ML) in the domain of children’s social care. Across the press, academia, and the worlds of policy and practice, concerns abound about the possible impacts of the growing use of ML in children’s social care on individuals, families, and communities. Many express legitimate worries about how the depersonalising and de-socialising effects greater use of automation is harming the care environment and negatively altering the way frontline workers are able to engage with families and children. Others raise concerns about how these data-driven ML systems are merely reinforcing, if not amplifying, historical patterns of systemic bias and discrimination. Others, still, highlight how the mixed results of existing ML innovations are signalling widespread conditions of poor data quality and questionable data collection and recording practices.