Better assessments key to the right support

We achieve this, but not consistently. We struggle because commissioners and providers have no shared language to describe the complex requirements of children and young people in care, and without a true understanding of needs, too many end up in the wrong care setting. We have long known that there is little correlation between the needs of children and young people in care, their outcomes, and the money spent. It is time we addressed it.

In our response to the Care Review, we can do things differently. There is emerging evidence that new approaches to assessment are improving decision making, outcomes, and reducing costs – for example, TCOM England, Valuing Care and Berri.

TCOM provides simple, reliable, comprehensive, and free-to-use assessment tools that have been empirically validated. The tools communicate needs, strengths and risks, and guide decision making at an individual, service, and system level. The child and adolescent needs and strengths assessment is the primary tool, with two companion metrics, the family advocacy support tool, suitable for assessing families, and the adults needs and strengths assessment for adult services. There is such confidence in the tools that the results are used by US insurance companies.

Valuing Care is helping to improve the life chances of children in care by strengthening the links between children's needs, the outcomes being pursued, and the resources available. Following assessment, the approach enables the placement cost of each child to be mapped against their individual needs. This helps councils to understand where need is across the cohort of children in care and how resources are used. This enables better decision making on support, placements and commissioning. This approach has delivered demonstrable impact on children's lives – for example, improving how commissioners find the right care and support for children; supporting more children to live safely at home with a significant decrease in the number of children in care; and engaging providers to ensure that their approach to finding homes for children is driven by their needs and strengths, rather than their risks and deficits, which is addressing sufficiency challenges and reducing costs.

Berri is an easy-to-use online questionnaire designed to identify children's needs, with tools to track how they change over time. You can target and track specific issues or give an overview for a group or service, allowing organisations to evidence improved outcomes, and commissioners to choose the right care setting. In a pilot of 125 children, the approach showed a 14 per cent improvement in the children's scores over six months. In a children's home, it was possible to identify that some children could move to a family care setting because they achieved scores shown to be manageable with support.

Whichever approach is adopted, services will need to have confidence that they work – that they are valid, robust and evidence based. They need to be easy to implement and simple to use. They must complement social work practice models, and they need to be affordable.

Introducing new ways of working will always be a challenge. Getting the culture and behaviour change right will be critical and will take considerable effort and resources. These approaches will help to get everyone on the same page, speaking the same language about needs, risks, strengths, costs and outcomes.

We need more research on such approaches – and generating more evidence will help inform better practice decision making – but it is increasingly evident that every local authority and care provider in England can do it, relatively simply, and should prioritise this.

• Mark Owers is a children's services and system adviser