Common Assessment Framework FAQ's

1. A simple pre-assessment checklist to help practitioners decide who would benefit from a common assessment.
2. A three-step process (prepare, discuss, deliver) for undertaking a common assessment, to help practitioners gather and understand information about the needs and strengths of the child, based on discussions with the child, their family and other practitioners as appropriate.
3. A standard form to help practitioners record, and, where appropriate, share with others, the findings from the assessment in terms that are helpful in working with the family to find a response to unmet needs.

There are four important reasons:

• To give all practitioners working with children and young people a holistic tool for identifying a child's needs before they reach crisis point and a shared language for discussing and addressing them.
• To ensure important needs are not overlooked and reduce the scale of assessments that some children and young people undergo.
• To provide a common structure to record information and facilitate information sharing between practitioners.
• To provide evidence to facilitate requests to involve other agencies, reducing unnecessary referrals and enabling specialist services to focus their resources where they are most needed.

The assessment process encourages practitioners to consider the needs of the child or young person in three key areas ('domains'):

Development of child, baby or young person

• Health:
  • general health
  • physical development
  • speech, language and communications development
• Emotional and social development
• Behavioural development
• Identity, including self-esteem, self-image and social presentation
• Family and social relationships
• Self-care skills and independence
• Learning
  • understanding, reasoning and problem solving
  • participation in learning, education and employment
  • progress and achievement in learning
  • aspirations

Parents and carers

• Basic care, ensuring safety and protection
• Eotional warmth and stability
• Guidance, boundaries and stimulation

Family and environmental factors

• Family history, functioning and well-being
• Wider family
• Housing, employment and financial considerations
• Social & community factors and resources, including education

The CAF has been developed by combining the underlying model of the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families with the main elements used in other assessment frameworks.

Most children will not need a CAF.  CAF is for children and young people with additional needs. These are children and young people who, according to the judgement of practitioners, require extra support to help them achieve the five Every Child Matters outcomes:

• being healthy;
• staying safe;
• enjoying and achieving;
• making a positive contribution;
• achieving economic well-being. 

We expect that the majority of common assessments will be undertaken or arranged by practitioners in universal services such as early years settings (for example children's centres), schools and health settings. These services are best equipped to identify possible needs in their early stages. Common assessments, particularly in the context of extended schools, will help schools tackle, along with other services, a broader range of social and behavioural issues acting as a barrier to learning and attainment. Similarly, in health, common assessments will help midwives and health visitors take a broad view of the issues affecting unborn and new born infants, as part of the national child health promotion programme; practitioners will apply these principles to older children and young people in other settings, such as health drop-ins in schools and further education colleges. The police will also have an important role in identifying children with additional needs and arranging for common assessments.

However all practitioners working with children and young people should have an awareness of the CAF and either know how to complete a common assessment themselves or know how to arrange to have one carried out.  Everyone working with children should be aware of the sorts of situations that indicate the need for a common assessment.
 

A common assessment can be done at any time - on unborn babies, new babies, children or young people. It is designed for use when:

• there is concern about how well a child (or unborn baby) or young person is progressing (this includes particularly vulnerable children and young people such as persistent truants and young runaways);
• their needs are unclear, or broader than a service can address on its own;
• a common assessment would help identify the needs, and provide a basis for getting other services involved.

The pre-assessment checklist can be used to help identify if a common assessment should be completed.

The decision about whether to do an assessment should be made jointly with the child and/or parent. Children should always be encouraged to discuss the assessment with their parents. If the child is old enough and competent to understand, they may make their own decision.
 

Step 1: Preparation  This involves recognising potential needs and then discussing the situation with the child, involving parents or carers unless this is not appropriate. The practitioner may talk to their manager, colleagues, or others - possibly those already involved with the child. It is important to find out whether a common assessment already exists. After reviewing the existing information a practitioner decides whether to undertake a common assessment with the agreement of the child and or family as appropriate.

Step 2: Discussion  This involves completing the assessment with the child and family, making use of information already gathered from the child, family or other practitioners, and completing a consent statement. At the end of the discussion the practitioner should understand better the child's strengths, needs, and what can be done to help.

Step 3: Delivery  This involves agreeing actions that the practitioner's service or the family can deliver, and considering what may be needed from other services. According to local practice, decisions may be made through meetings with other practitioners and the family, and the appointment of one practitioner as lead professional where integrated support is required. Note: the CAF does not give a practitioner the ability to guarantee a service from another organisation without consulting that organisation.
 

Potential benefits include:

• Quicker service provision to children and families
  • as a result of more appropriate referrals to specialist services.
• Better service provision to children, young people and families
  • due to the CAF looking at the whole child rather than the needs of the child from the perspective of one particular agency.
• Less repetition and duplication for children, young people and families
  • due to the CAF information being shared, with consent, between practitioners.
• Better understanding and more effective communication amongst practitioners
  • due to the promotion of a common language around the CAF.
• Time savings for practitioners
  • who will be able to build on existing CAF information rather than collecting it themselves from scratch.

• By supporting better information sharing between practitioners.
• By equipping practitioners at all levels to identify the signs that a child needs extra support, assess their specific needs and provide a vehicle for gathering practitioners together to address those needs.

These themes run throughout Lord Laming's recommendations.
 

The Green Paper Every Child Matters (September 2003) proposed the introduction of a national CAF as an important part of a strategy for helping children and young people to achieve the five priority outcomes of: being healthy; staying safe; enjoying and achieving; making a positive contribution and economic well-being.

This responded to concerns that services and practitioners tend to assess particular aspects of a child's welfare and development, with the risk that potential needs lying outside that focus may be overlooked. Assessments often take place entirely uninformed by previous assessments.

Following initial consultation, Every Child Matters: The Next Steps (March 2004) gave a commitment to producing a CAF by the end of 2004 and to a public consultation.

The statutory guidance accompanying sections 10 and 11 of the Children Act 2004 sets out the Government's expectations that CAF, the lead professional and information sharing are key aspects of delivering better services to children. Although these three developments are not mandatory, adoption of the CAF, lead professional and information sharing arrangements, as published, will lead to greater standardisation and will facilitate cross-border working. In addition, the CAF will help local areas to meet improvements to assessment specified in their Children and Young People's Plans.
 

CAF will replace the assessment aspects of the Connexions Framework for Assessment, Planning and Review. Other assessments such as universal checks and targeted assessments (for children in need; those with special educational needs etc.) will remain in place.

However, the CAF may be appropriate to be used before, or in conjunction with a specialist assessment to help understand and articulate the full range of a child's needs. It can help ensure that the referral to a specialist service is relevant and can build up a comprehensive picture of needs, rather than a series of partial snapshots.
 

The CAF, the lead professional and information sharing are all essential for the effective provision of integrated services to children and families.

• The CAF provides a process for identifying needs and bringing services together to meet those needs more swiftly and effectively.
• Where a range of needs are identified that require an integrated response, the lead professional co-ordinates these actions and acts as a single point of contact for the child and family
• Effective information sharing then helps practitioners work together to deliver a coherent and relevant service to the child and family.
  

ContactPoint will provide a tool to help practitioners identify which other practitioners are working with the child. Like CAF, it is a tool to improve integrated working between agencies.

In developing the requirements for ContactPoint, the processes involved with administering a CAF are being closely examined. We expect that ContactPoint will record that a CAF has been completed, when it was completed and who it was completed by.
 

An electronic template of the CAF form and pre-assessment checklist are downloadable from www.everychildmatters.gov.uk. These templates have been available for some time now and enable "simple" IT support for CAF - for example storing the form securely within Case Management systems and sharing by physical transfer (eg CD, memory stick) or by secure email.

However consultation with Local Authorities and practitioners has made it clear that there is more to CAF than just the form. In order for e-enablement to be truly effective it must support the whole multi-agency process - from preparation, to discussion, and following through to delivery.

Based on these consultations we have published the eCAF Document Set, which is also downloadable from www.everychildmatters.gov.uk. It contains an overview of the consultation's findings and numerous detailed documents - including business process maps, a data model, and a Requirements Catalogue and defines national standards for an eCAF system. Part of the eCAF Document Set is the XML Schema. XML is a widely accepted format for data exchange, and this schema therefore allows eCAF information to be shared between all compliant systems.

As the next step in this process of trialling and consultation we will be working with a selection of Local Authorities to develop exemplar eCAF systems that meet the national eCAF standards and processes. Our aim is to learn form this so that we determine how to implement a national consistent approach for the IT enablement of CAF.

In the medium term we also will be supporting local areas by rolling out (by the end of 2008) ContactPoint which will enable practitioners to identify whether a child has a CAF and will provide contact details for the practitioner who has most recently completed the CAF. Prior to roll-out of ContactPoint, local areas will need to consider interim arrangements for enabling practitioners to check if a CAF already exists for a child and if so whom to contact about it. A number of areas have already made progress in doing this.
 

DfES has provided training packages for CAF trainers and CAF practitioners for use at local level. It is for local authorities and their partner agencies to determine whether and how to adapt the  training packages for use in locally provided training. 

DfES is working with the Children's Workforce Development Council (CWDC) to plan to embed the CAF into relevant national occupational standards and qualifications.
 

Local authorities should put in place arrangements to ensure practitioners undertaking common assessments are suitably skilled and trained in order to complete assessments that are fit for purpose. They should also put in place mechanisms to enable practitioners to undertake relevant training, seek advice and get support with issues that they feel ill equipped to tackle.

Managers should ensure that practitioners needing to undertake common assessments undergo specific CAF training. Practitioners should also have the generic skills of assessment and the qualities and attributes needed to work with vulnerable families. In order to undertake an effective CAF, practitioners will need to have the skills and knowledge covered by the Common Core of Skills and Knowledge for the Children's Workforce before undertaking assessments.

For further information, please contact The ISA Team on (01472) 323439 or by email

• Family Information Service
• Every Child Matters (CAF)