June Statham

Using the ‘Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale’ in playgroups

Summary An increasing emphasis on the importance of quality in daycare and early education services has created a demand for research tools with which to evaluate this important aspect of provision. This paper describes one such instrument developed in the USA, the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, and analyses the experience of using this scale to structure observations of the environment provided in preschool playgroups in England.

Part-Time Fostering: Recruiting and Supporting Carers for Short-Break Schemes

Although most local authorities provide or commission home-based short-break services to support families with a disabled child, such schemes have been much slower to develop as a form of support for families where children are in need for reasons other than disability. June Statham and Margaret Greenfields draw on a study of barriers to the development of ‘support care’ schemes in England, focusing in particular on the motivation and experiences of those who undertake this part-time fostering work and the skills and support they require. Since childminders can now be registered to provide overnight care, and some already provide daytime care for children placed with them by social workers, the potential for childminders to expand their service into short-break care is also considered. The paper concludes that although local authorities have sometimes been reluctant to develop short-break schemes because they fear diverting potential carers from mainstream fostering, in practice such fears are not well founded. Support care schemes can offer a way for those who might be interested in fostering to ‘dip a toe’ in the water, as well as helping to retain existing foster carers who might otherwise leave the service. This kind of service also fits well with the current policy emphasis on early intervention to support children and families who are experiencing difficulties and on promoting flexibility in the social care workforce.

Book Review: Costs and Consequences of Placing Children in CareCosts and Consequences of Placing Children in CareWardHarriet, HolmesLisa and SoperJeanJessica Kingsley Publishers2008288 pages £39.99

This book addresses issues of particular relevance to policy makers and managers in children’s services: the high costs of placing children in foster and residential care coupled with often poor outcomes; the extensive variation between local authorities in spending on children in care; and the relationship between needs, costs, services and outcomes. In the context of the White Paper Care Matters: Time for change and the Children and Young Person’s Act 2008, it provides a timely exploration of questions such as whether higher costs are likely to reflect better services and better outcomes for children. The book has a dual identity. It is both part of the Child Welfare Outcomes series reporting findings from research carried out by the Centre for Child and Family Research at Loughborough University, and one of the 14 studies commissioned by the Department of Health under the Costs and Outcomes in Children’s Social Care research initiative. (Key findings from all 14 studies were summarised in an overview report by Beecham and Sinclair, 2007.) The book also has a dual purpose. The first part reports findings from an original research project investigating the costs and consequences of placing children in care. Unlike many research studies, this one resulted in a very practical application: the development of computer software to help local authorities calculate the probable costs over time of looking after different groups of children in foster and residential care. Known as the Cost Calculator for Children’s Services, this software is available for local authorities to purchase (or to try out a demonstration version for free – see www.ccfcs.org.uk). The second part of the book describes how the methodology for calculating costs and linking them to outcomes, originally developed for the research study, was subsequently developed into this practical tool. The Cost Calculator is currently being extended to cover case management processes relating to all children in need, not just those who become looked after, and to consider how health, mental health and education services can be costed in a similar manner. Early chapters focus on the development of unit costs for eight social care processes involved in work with children looked after away from home, such as deciding a child needs to be looked after and finding the initial placement, care planning, maintaining the placement (this accounted for by far the biggest share of total costs), review, exit from care and legal processes. Unit costs were developed in a ‘bottom-up’ approach, using focused discussions with over 140 staff in six participating local authorities, so they reflect what staff actually did and the time it took. Subsequent chapters apply these unit costs to data from case files and management information systems on 478 children (aged 10+) whose care experiences were followed for a period of 20 months. This allowed the researchers to calculate the costs of different care pathways. They worked out that the standard unit cost for maintaining a child for a week in residential care was eight times that of the cost of foster care, 9.5 times that of a kinship placement and 12.5 times that of a placement with own parents. They also explored the factors that contributed to variation in unit costs, which included factors related to the local authority, to the placement and to the child. Eleven different categories of children were identified, ranging from those with no additional support needs (just over a quarter of the looked after population on average) to those with multiple combinations of needs. A small number of children with complex needs who require specialist placements and