Referrals and Assessments
Last updated: October 7, 2008
Table of Contents
5. Common Assessment Framework [CAF]
The Common Assessment Framework is an important tool for early intervention and is a nationally standardised approach to conducting an assessment of the needs of a child and deciding how they should be met.
CAF provides a common method of assessment across children’s services and local areas. It facilitates early identification of needs, leading to co-ordinated provision of services, involving a lead professional where appropriate, and sharing information to avoid the duplication of assessments.
The common assessment is designed for when there are concerns about how well a child is progressing in terms of their health, welfare, behaviour, progress in learning or any other aspect of their well-being.
It has been designed specifically, as a simple checklist, to help practitioners assess needs at an earlier stage and then work with families, other practitioners and agencies, to meet them and ensure effective communication.
CAF is designed so that a complete picture of a child’s needs (including any unmet needs) can be obtained at an early stage, and enables information to be gathered in a structured way.
The aim is that children and families can be helped to access the right services early and so, wherever possible, prevent the escalation of difficulties. It also means that where a child is referred to a specialist service, the information gathered through the CAF can be built on rather than a new assessment being undertaken and, importantly, the child does not have to go through the time-consuming and potentially distressing process of telling their story over and over again.
A CAF assessment can only be undertaken with the consent of children, young people and their families.
The most important way of ensuring that these children can be identified earlier and helped before things reach crisis point is for everyone whose job involves working with children and families to keep an eye out for their well-being, and be prepared to help if something is going wrong.
The CAF creates a structure for agencies to work together, reducing the negative impact of agencies working in isolation, through a lead professional system where families are involved in identifying their own strengths, networks of support and additional services that they might need.
It covers all needs, not just those needs that individual services considered that they have prime responsibility for. Even if workers are not trained to do a common assessment themselves, knowing about the CAF will help them recognise when it might help so that they can arrange for someone else to do the assessment.
Whenever a professional/worker in any agency becomes concerned that a child may have needs which are not being met by universal services (e.g. education and health services), the professional/worker should complete a common assessment to help them form a judgement about how to appropriately meet need.
Completing a common assessment will:
- enable the professional/worker to identify the child’s needs
- provide a structure for systematic gathering and recording of information
- record evidence of concerns and a base-line for measuring progress in addressing them
- may provide a framework for a referral discussion to Children’s social care for an initial or core assessment or to another service for a specialist assessment.
The common assessment should not delay the process where a professional is concerned that a child is, or may be, at risk of significant harm. In such cases the professional must make a referral directly to Children’s social care Duty and Investigation Team.
The completed common assessment should be used as a basis for single and multi-agency or multi-disciplinary discussion and decision-making. The outcomes of such discussions may be that the:
- no additional needs are identified;
- child needs additional support and this can be met within the single agency;
- child needs support from another agency, or several agencies;
- child should be referred for a specialist assessment for example:
- Children’s social care,
- child and adolescent mental health services
- special educational needs assessment)
- a medical diagnosis.
The Common Assessment Framework is based on the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families, this means that specialist assessments can easily build on the information gathered by a common assessment.
Local authorities and their partner agencies are working towards implementing the common assessment in electronic format, known as e-CAF.
