Care Planning and the Role of the Independent Reviewing Officer: Research Report, October 2015
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Grimshaw and Sinclair concluded that the new regulations and guidance had led to improvements in social work planning for children in care, and participation of children and parents, but there was still room for improvement (1997: 242).In particular, they thought that there was an over-focus on the review meeting, and there should be a shift to thinking of review as a process, ending with a final child-centred meeting and completion of the necessary records (1997: 250).They recommended a clearer conceptualisation of care plans, that they should consist of two elements, the overall objectives and the steps that should be taken to achieve them (1997: 245).They also recommended a clearer conceptualisation of participation, awareness of its various levels and forms, and a proactive approach to achieving it (1997: 248).Finally, they recommended that 'Local authorities should clarify the decision-making role of reviews in relation to other decision-making bodies and to the responsibilities of senior management ' (1997: 251).Grimshaw and Sinclair's points about understanding the review as a process not just a meeting, and the two parts of the care plan, have proved influential.The relationship between the decisions made in reviews and through other managerial and organisational processes has proved harder to clarify, as the empirical data from this study will show; and their messages about the role of specialist officers to chair the reviews (discussed below) have perhaps been unfairly forgotten. The 1990s: other key developmentsKey developments in the 1990s included a) high profile programmes to ensure safety and improve outcomes for children in care, notably the introduction of the Looking After Children materials (1995 on) and the Quality Protects programme (1998 on); b) growing understanding of the importance of hearing children's views and promoting their participation; c) continuing debates about the proper role of the court in reviewing the progress of care plans after a care order had been made, and d) the evolution of local authority systems for reviewing cases.The Looking After Children materials were developed as part of an initiative to introduce the idea of 'outcomes' to social work thinking and, through that, to improve social work practice and care planning for children in care, inter-agency working, and the quality of care that the children received in their placements (Ward, 1995; for a critique, Bell, 1998).The project identified seven key dimensions for considering a child's needs and progress, and the help they required (health, education, emotional and behavioural development, identity, family and social relationships, social presentation, and self-care skills).It introduced a set of documents to assess, record and review these.The forms were initially designed as research instruments but a number of local authorities began to use them as ways of meeting the new planning and review requirements under the Children Act 1989.They were developed into practice tools over the period 1991-95, and then implemented nationally.By 1998 they were being used by nearly all local authorities in England (Bell, 1998).(They have been adopted in other countries too, notably Canada and Australia.)As noted in Chapter 1, the seven dimensions are now specified in the 2010 Regulations as matters which the care plan must address.Widespread concerns in the 1990s about the ill-treatment of children in care came to a head with the investigation into child abuse in children's homes in North Wales (Jillings, 1996(Jillings, , not made public until 2013;;Waterhouse, 2000).They led to the Utting report (1997) on the importance of proper safeguards for children in care.The Quality Protects programme, led by the Department of Health under the Labour government, aimed to ensure that local authorities provided 'safe, effective and
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".