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Abstract
This perspective piece highlights an everyday feature of the work of UK social workers, their managers and policy-makers. The use of outcomes as a measurement of achievement. The growth of the use of outcomes, their present-day ubiquity, the professed efficacy of their use and their connections with managerialism are then problematised. It is suggested that the deployment of outcomes can serve as a seeming assurance of efficiency. This is to the detriment of less technocratic, softer, more uncertain, yet more realistic and humanist, efforts to describe change and growth. No solutions – or outcomes – are offered. Rather this short perspective piece adopts the approach of ‘a problem well stated is a problem half-solved’.
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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Even allowing for the increased number of pages in the 1999 and 2009 editions, the jump in frequency of mentions remains notable.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Gary Clapton
Gary Clapton is a Reader in Social Work and writes on adoption, fathers and child welfare and protection. Correspondence to: Gary Clapton, Social Work, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, 15a George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, 0131 650 3903. Email: [email protected]