News

Case chronologies safeguard children and are now a fact of life for local authority children and families services. While at first they can be viewed as an added burden to social workers, chronologies are proving an essential tool in caring for vulnerable children.

It is thought by many that those who fail to understand the past cannot plan for the future, and are condemned to repeat their mistakes.

The failure to grasp patterns in a child's history was one of the key themes running through the Laming report into the death of Victoria Climbi'. One of the report's recommendations - just two short lines - had huge implications for many children and families services. Within six months of the publication of the report, directors of social services had to ensure every child's case file had, on the inside of the front cover, a "properly maintained chronology". Put simply, this is a record of significant events in the child's life -Êespecially their relations with social services such as interventions, support given to the child or their family, decisions made on risk and other life events.


There was universal agreement these chronologies would help to assess risk, identify patterns of behaviour and ensure safer practices for looked-after children.

But how do you begin to put this requirement into practice in a borough such as Lambeth, the largest in inner London? There are nearly 1,500 child cases open at any one time, while referral and assessment teams carry out large numbers of initial assessments every day. Capacity seemed a major issue.

However, as we have worked through the process it is becoming clear that initial work on chronologies is helping us to save time and effort -Êand to deliver a better service. In Lambeth our looked-after children teams ran a pilot project in 2002 ensuring looked-after young people had a proper case history when they left the care of Lambeth. During the life of the project, the Laming report was published and we took on board the recommendations and began expanding our pilot.

The time-consuming work of going through files paid off almost immediately. The chronologies were used in looked-after reviews. They helped to inform specialist resources when they were needed. And they helped us to understand placement breakdowns. For example, last year a young man in our care made a suicide attempt. We were able to give the child and adolescent mental health unit his history straight away, helping the staff there to understand what had happened and make plans for his treatment.

On 3 November last year, the judicial protocol for care proceedings was introduced. This requires court proceedings to be "front loaded" with key documentation. We have ensured our method of preparing chronologies has been adjusted to meet the standard for the judicial protocol and are now asking our staff to prepare chronologies on incoming cases, with the knowledge they could be required for court. If that time comes, we are ready; if it doesn't, we have a document that is a working tool for child protection conferences, core assessments, external referrals or therapeutic work.


We have been working with our IT section to come up with a more effective record-keeping process. A shared database is now being built to store and update the chronologies. We will be able to search the system to see whether a chronology contains, for example, a child protection or court component.

Some people still wonder what goes in and what stays out of a chronology. What we are saying to practitioners in Lambeth is to follow the judicial protocol requirement to confine the entries to what is significant in a child's life and to avoid duplicating what is already there in case recording. Getting to grips with historical chronologies going back generations still causes some of us sleepless nights, but at least all new cases coming in now have a chronology started as a matter of routine.

Lambeth is moving in the right direction as regards those two short lines making up recommendation 58 of the Laming report - but, more importantly, the chronology and its use as a working tool is rising steadily up the agenda for improving our practice. 

Keith Revoir is project manager for case chronologies in the London Borough of Lambeth.