Research being conducted at LSE's Centre for Analysis of Social Excludion (CASE) has been exploring how the capability approach developed by Nobel Prize winner Professor Amartya Sen can be operationalised as a framework for conceptualising and measuring multidimensional social outcomes. As part of the Children’s Information project, we will be drawing on CASE knowledge and expertise in this field as part of a broader workstream on frameworks for identifying and measuring children’s needs. This workstream will also draw on previous work on children’s frameworks undertaken by our project partners and advisers. This includes work by project Co-Investigator Lisa Holmes on the Children’s Social Care Framework; work by project Principal-Investigator Leon Feinstein on the Child Vulnerability Framework developed by the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England; and work by Senior Adviser Julie Selwyn on subjective wellbeing and the Bright Spots programme.
Like the other workstreams of the Children’s Information project, the ‘needs’ workstream will be a collaboration between academic and non-academic partners, based on a model of continuous mutual learning and two-way interactions. Our local authority partners have extensive and in-depth experiences of the development and uses of local and national frameworks for identifying and measuring children’s needs. To learn more about the national and local children’s framework that are currently being used, as well as their purposes and functions, their advantages and limitations, and the scope and priorities for improvements, we will be undertaking a series of semi-structured interviews with leaders and practitioners in each of the local sites. Additionally, we will be able to engage with and learn from a broader number of local authorities and stakeholders, through the Learning Network (a group of 20 other LAs meeting twice a year for the duration of the project enrich the learning from the local sites) being taken forward by our project partner, Research in Practice.
In addition, we will be undertaking a desk review of the many different local, regional, national and international frameworks for identifying and measuring children’s needs that have evolved in recent years. As the discussion so far suggests, these frameworks can radically differ in terms of their purposes, focus, coverage, their theoretical underpinnings and their engagement with children, young people and families. One early output from the workstream is likely to be a navigational tool that will enable policy makers and practitioners to rapidly access, explore, understand and assess these different frameworks for themselves, to help them to determine which is best suited to their context and purpose.
