When it comes to deciding what kind of placement is best for a child – no matter whether it is for a child who is moved out of an institution, or for a child who is no longer able to live with his family – individual assessments are essential. Without very detailed information about many aspects of the child’s life, experiences, development and feelings, there is no hope of determining what is in the child’s best interest.
Individual assessments are on my mind, because it is one of the topics that I will be giving training on in the coming week. In a situation of deinstitutionalisation, I have found that it can be challenging to convince people of the need for detailed individual assessments. In part, I understand why. At an earlier stage of the deinstitutionalisation process, the transition team was already tasked with gathering stock and flow data.
This stock and flow data is general information about the children who are currently in the institution, and about how many children have been admitted to or discharged from the institution in the past five years. For all these children they had to gather names, ages, information about the existence of living family members, where the child came from, why the child ended up in the institution, if the child has siblings, and what the child’s religion is.
This is already quite a lot of information. And with the overview of this information, a general idea can be formed of roughly how many children are likely to be able to return to their own families, how many may be able to be placed in foster families, etc. Having a rough idea of these things helps with the planning of what kind of support and services need to be put in place, and in what locations and quantities.
However, useful as this information is, it is not nearly enough to be able to determine what would be best for an individual child. For that far more information is needed. Because, just knowing that a child is 16 years old and has an uncle, does not tell you whether the uncle might be able to take the child in, whether it would be safe to allow the child to go live with the uncle, or what kind of support the uncle and the child might need in order for the uncle to take in the child.
Or, if it was known that the uncle is unable to take care of the child, the information available does not tell you whether the teenager would be willing to be placed in a foster family, or whether a foster family is likely to be able to cope with his behaviour. It does not tell you whether the teenager might be ready to enter a supported living arrangement in the community where he can learn to live independently, with some supervision.
Nor does the stock data give you any information to indicate whether the teenager is in need of medical or psychological support in whatever kind of placement he might enter. Or, for that matter whether he is still going to school and whether the location of his school needs to be taken into consideration when making decisions.
Individual assessments are essential for making responsible decisions about the placement of a child, they are the only way to really determine the child’s best interest. And so the considerable investment in time and resources needed to gather all of the necessary data is vital for the child’s well-being.
In the next blog, I will explain more about how to go about doing an individual assessment.
Please share this blog, to help spread awareness.
