WRITTEN ON April 9th, 2008 BY Ruth Kennedy AND STORED IN Design: user-oriented, Foundation of Trust, What do we want?

DCSF recently published a summary of an evaluation of the Integrated Children’s System (ICS), which raises a number of significant issues for the continued and successful implementation of the scheme by local authorities. The research, carried out by York University and funded by the department draws attention to:

• The unanticipated scale of organisational change which the implementation of a complex system such as ICS brought about.
• Difficulties in system commissioning and contracting by local authorities – a long-standing issue between local authorities and suppliers which was magnified by the size and scope of the ICS.
It highlights the need for greater cooperation between users in managing IT contracts to ensure that what is delivered is fit for purpose and maximises the benefits of having electronic social care records.
• The need for improvements in social work training to ensure that qualified workers are knowledgeable about the research and conceptual base of the ICS, and are enabled to develop their analytical skills.
• The challenge of reflecting the involvement and voices of the children and families themselves within an electronic system.
• The need for greater support for social workers to use the system appropriately with disabled children and, more particularly, to manage the challenge of assessing children who may be at different developmental stages for different dimensions of their lives.

Supporting and in places improving or intervening in the lives of children living in complicated and at times dysfunctional family settings is enormously skilled work. To make a positive contribution to keeping children safe and well, it seems obvious that an electronic record system must support and promote the authoritative but sensitive, nuanced best practice of social work and other professions – not provide a technocratic, un-feeling underpinning infrastructure. It is therefore concerning that the research uncovered disagreement about

whether the quality of social work practice has been promoted by the system, particularly in relation to direct work with children and their families and carers.

How those experiencing public services FEEL is critical to judging ‘success’ – especially in social care. So alarm bells should ring when research indicates some social workers felt strongly that the documents produced using the system, such as the care plans, were not suitable for sharing with service users: being considered to be too long, the language within them inappropriate and complex, and the information within them too dense to be shared. Some social workers complained that the use of the system obscured information about the family context and resulted in the loss of the ‘stories’ of children’s lives. And critically,

some social workers in the study perceived that they spent more time on record keeping in the office and less time working directly with children and families.

In the full research report, one interviewee said it took 10 times as long to do a care plan under ICS, which meant they were being taken away from the “real social work” of interacting with children and families. (Intriguingly, in the sole piece of emboldened text, the DCSF summary highlights that

In none of the cases examined, however, was data entry social workers’ predominant activity.

Thank goodness for that!

Community Care and El Reg both pick up the story and highlight the fact that the department’s summary downplays or loses some of the more negative elements of the evaluation. Community Care notes that the full research piece highlights complaints by social workers that the ICS was promoting form-driven social work that could threaten the profession’s values and good practice:

Researchers concluded that the system, based on a series of tick-box forms, was not tailored to individual children, and failed to ask important questions of some children while asking ­others that were irrelevant, resulting in “bland analyses”. The report said: “The process was felt to diminish analysis and risk assessment. There were particular concerns about risk because it was unclear where the information would be located.”

Despite a clear softening of messages, it seems to me that there’s plenty in the DCSF’s own summary for the implementation teams to work on, if they really want to get the ICS right and avoid the classic technical, social and behavioural problems which have best large IT implementations in the recent past. It’s worrying therefore that The Register quotes the department dismissing the research completely:

because “the research does not provide a sound basis on which to judge the potential value of the ICS”.

WIBBI we look back in 3 years and can see the ICS was an exemplar of excellence (listening, responding, testing, adjusting), and not a repeat of the problems designed into the CSA IT system.