BJSW Advance Access published online on February 25, 2009
British Journal of Social Work, doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcp020
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A Tale of Two CAFs: The Impact of the Electronic Common Assessment Framework
Andrew Pithouse is Professor in Social Research in the Childhood Research Group in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. His research interests address policy and services for children and related organizational and professional contexts. Christopher Hall is Reader in Applied Childhood Studies at the Centre for Applied Childhood Studies, University of Huddersfield. His research interests include discourse and narrative approaches to professional practice, communication skills and child welfare policy. Sue Peckover is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Childhood Studies at the University of Huddersfield. She has a background in health visiting and a research interest in professional practices in child welfare. Sue White is Professor in Social Work at the University of Lancaster. She has undertaken a number of ethnographic studies of everyday child welfare practices and is currently Principal Investigator on an ESRC Public Services Programme study of error and blame in children's social care.
Correspondence to Andrew Pithouse, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, CF10 3WT, UK. E-mail: pithouse{at}cardiff.ac.uk
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Abstract |
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The Common Assessment Framework (CAF) is an electronic system for assessing children and sharing information between child welfare professionals, which is at various stages of pilot and implementation in England and Wales. Research by the authors in England (Peckover et al., 2008a, 2008b; White et al., 2008) and in Wales (Pithouse et al., 2004; Pithouse, 2006) informs this paper in order to compare CAF as implicating a number of policy ‘goods’, with CAF as a set of worker and organizational accomplishments.1 Our interest here is that in the course of implementation, policy aims have become submerged in day-to-day practice and that, analytically, there are differences between the ‘CAF of policy’ and the ‘CAF of practice’; in brief, there are, conceptually, two CAFs, the formal construct of policy and the applied CAF as constructed by multiple organizations across Wales and England, wherein there is no singular model. Indeed, we demonstrate that there are all manner of common assessment designs operating in the world of practice. Rather than rehearsing our research findings (the above sources offer an abundance), we use this opportunity to develop and synthesize our arguments about key assumptions and conceptual properties that underpin the CAF of policy and practice and which may have wider provenance in respect of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in child welfare.
Keywords: Child welfare, interprofessional working, children and families, children's rights, information technology