This chapter considers the key stages in a child's stay in residential care: assessment, care planning and programming. The Children who wait report (Rowe and Lambert, 1973) identified a situation where children stayed in residential child care settings with little sense of purpose to the placement, other than that of providing everyday care. This report posed fundamental questions as to the suitability of residential child care to provide long-term care for children; this, axiomatically, being assumed to be located in natural or increasingly in substitute family settings. The publication of Children who wait coincided with the professionalisation of social work in the early 1970s. Within a casework model, the basic social work process was considered to comprise stages of: referral, assessment, planning, intervention and evaluation. Assimilation into professional social work in the 1970s placed an onus on residential child care to fit in with such a model, to articulate a sense of purpose and progress through the system, rather than merely to provide everyday care.

Reports throughout the 1980s highlighted specific flaws in the care system. Parton (1991) identified the absence of a logical link between what was happening in care settings and hoped-for outcomes for children. And within increasingly managerial cultures questions of cost became uppermost; was the government getting value for money in respect of resources directed towards care provision and children's welfare more generally? At another level the introduction of the category ‘children in need’ in the 1989 Children Act demanded some mechanism through which these children might be identified. In residential child care reports such as those by Utting (1991) and Skinner (1992), asserting that residential child care should be a positive choice for some children similarly required some means of assessing those for whom it might be so.

Assessment

Coulshed and Orme identify assessment as being core to social work practice. They define it as: