Managing Assessment. Quality Planning in Assessment Procedures of the Dutch Child Protection Board

Correspondence to Carolus van Nijnatten, University of Utrecht, Department of General Social Sciences, P.O. Box 80140, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands. E-mail: C.vanNijnatten{at}fss.uu.nl Summary The Child Welfare and Protection Board (CP), which plays a centralrole in Dutch child welfare is an agency of the Dutch Ministryof Justice. The CP may present petitions to the juvenile courtfor their judgement regarding the custody or guardianship ofchildren. The Board presents petitions concerning legal propositionsfor custody, suspension of the execution of custody, provisionalguardianship, and dispossession and restriction of custody.These petitions are based on an investigation of the socialconditions of the child and the family. In the past, the qualityof these investigations has often been questioned, the maincriticism being the lack of any systematic procedure and thestrong intrusion of personal opinion. Nevertheless, social workersof the CP Board often regarded potential changes to these investigationswith some apprehension because they feared the assessment proceduresmight lose their human character. More recently, the CP Boardhas experimented with a system of testing hypotheses in itsassessment procedures. In this article, we present the resultsof an evaluation of this new procedure. The results are presentedin the context of the recent debate, published in the BritishJournal of Social Work, between the advocates and opponentsof making social work more scientifically rigorous.