The Field Social Work Implications of Residential Child Care

Abstract

SUMMARY The workloads of field social work staff vary markedly, and little is known about the 'burdens' imposed by different groups of clients or cases. The research study reported here set out to examine the extent to which field social work involvement in residential child care varied between individual children and to attempt to explain that variation in terms of the characteristics of children, the characteristics and workloads of staff and their teams, the packages of services received by children and their families, and some general features of the residential placements. Field social worker involvement was measured in terms of the number of contacts between 'caseholders' and 'case' and the total amount of time spent on the case over a three month period. The observed variations in these two indicators were found to be significantly associated with the characteristics of cases and other factors. Indeed, these characteristics explained almost two-thirds of the variance. The empirical results have a number of policy implications which are discussed under six heads: supply constraints, caseload weighting, fieldwork organization, coordination and monitoring, out-county placements and travelling time, and comparative costings.