Clinical Judgement and Decision-Making in Children’s Social Work: An analysis of the ‘front door’ system

This paper is not a comprehensive review of all aspects of social workers’ decisions, but rather focuses on the entry point for children coming in to contact with the Child Protection System, usually referred to as the ‘front door’.
It is set out in three sections:
Section 1 details the approach that BIT took to gathering the analysis. This focuses principally upon the methodologies that the team used to gather information, which took the form both of academic literature reviews and front-line visits to a number of local authorities. It also sets out, in simplified form, the ‘front door’ process that most Local Authorities use.
Section 2 is the most substantial part of this paper. It sets out the findings from the research undertaken by BIT. Four major behavioural factors are identified which we judge to have the greatest effect upon social workers’ decision-making capacity and capabilities. Each of these is set out in turn, and evidence from research and field experiments is brought to bear to enable us to understand better what the implications might be for the way that the front door process is organised.
Section 3 takes forward this analysis and presents four high level recommendations. The first of these centres around the way that data is drawn upon and analysed (or not) to help inform the front door process.
The final three recommendations focus on three areas in which this information could be used to run randomised controlled trials in the UK – which we believe could help to build up the evidence base around ‘what works’, while pioneering the introduction of a range of new tools and techniques that have been demonstrated to work well in other areas of complex, professional decision-making.