Assessing risk of further child maltreatment – a research-based approach: Practice Tool (2013)

Assessing the risk of further maltreatment is central to protecting children who have already suffered significant harm, but the Assessment Framework focuses primarily on need and does not explicitly consider risk. There has been criticism of social work assessments as being too descriptive and insufficiently analytical – with a tendency of providing a great deal of background information without addressing the ‘so what?’ question about what this means for a particular child (for example Turney, 2011; Turney et al, 2011).