Costing a child's journey through the child welfare system from in home to out of home care

This session will focus on an approach to cost children’s trajectories through the child welfare system, capturing the services and support they receive both while placed away from home and during the time that they are... [ view full abstract ]

This session will focus on an approach to cost children’s trajectories through the child welfare system, capturing the services and support they receive both while placed away from home and during the time that they are supported in their families.
Since 2000 researchers at the Centre for Child and Family Research, Loughborough University have been carrying out a programme of research to explore the relationship between the needs, costs and outcomes of child welfare services. A key output from this research programme is the development of a purpose designed software tool: the Cost Calculator for Children’s Services (CCfCS). The tool produces a series of analyses to explore the costs of different trajectories for children in out of home care, showing variations for children with different needs and circumstances, and for different placement types. The analyses also include exploration of outcomes according to needs, circumstances and service response.
Research and development is currently underway to extend the tool and the conceptual framework that underpins it for children and young people in receipt of child welfare services while remaining with their families. The tool is also being extended to follow the care experiences of young people up to the age of 25, to explore their transitions from care and longer term outcomes. This research is being carried out in partnership with a local authority children’s services department in England (North Yorkshire) to develop a model to support adolescents (No Wrong Door), funded by the Department for Education’s Innovation Programme.
This session will build on other papers within the symposium and will focus on the child level data items that are being used to carry out the longitudinal analyses. The work to bring together different data sets to capture needs and outcomes data that is held by a range of different public sector agencies will also be explored. These include data from child welfare, education, police and youth offending services. Examples of the analyses that are produced will be presented, along with future plans for development of the tool. Findings from the No Wrong Door evaluation project will also be included to illustrate the potential cost savings associated with increased stability for adolescents along with reductions in offending and other risk taking behaviours.