MAKING AND MANAGING ELECTRONIC CHILDREN: E-assessment in child welfare

Abstract

‘Every Child Matters’ (ECM) is a government response to longstanding concerns about child welfare and protection. A key feature is the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve information sharing and inter-professional communication. One of the proposals requires the establishment of an index, ContactPoint, which is a database containing information on all children in their area, to be used by child welfare professionals to indicate their involvement with a child and, where there is ‘cause for concern’, to facilitate joint action. Whilst these proposals for harnessing ICTs within child welfare are a central part of the government's modernization strategy, plans for the Index have been heavily criticized for its panoptic potential to invade privacy and override professional discretion and judgement. This paper reports findings from an ethnographic study funded by the ESRC e-Society Programme. Drawing on data collected in one ‘Trailblazer’ local authority area during the pilot phase, it describes the introduction of a local child index and the ways in which professionals and the technologies are drawn together within the local child welfare network. For the Index to achieve its original purpose of improving information sharing and inter-professional communication it must be ‘used’ by child welfare practitioners. But establishing the Index as a friend to the child welfare professional is not a straightforward process. The research suggests this is dependent on a set of relations that are being constantly negotiated and accomplished in everyday practice. It is clear the deployment of ICTs in professional practice is highly contingent upon local policy implementation, the local arrangement of services and the everyday practices of busy and sceptical practitioners.

Keywords:

• Child welfare
• ethnography
• technology
• modernization
• database
• information sharing

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Professors Brid Featherstone (University of Bradford) and Andy Bilson (University of Central Lancashire) for their involvement in this study, and the ESRC e-society programme (Award No: 341-25-0023) for funding the research. Our thanks also to the three referees for their careful reading of the earlier draft and their helpful comments.

Notes

1. We have adopted this term, derived from Actor Network Theory, to describe both human and non-human agents in the network.