TCOM England is a collaborative, not-for-profit, assessment-based system to improve decision-making, evidence and outcomes in children’s social care.
Reliably assessing and communicating needs and strengths - to guide decision-making and service responses, and to enable meaningful monitoring of outcomes - is a continuous challenge and one shared by all local authorities, providers and practitioners. To improve our understanding of what works, when, where and for which children, our sector needs a sustainable, long-term solution.
As part of our ongoing work to facilitate improvements in evidence-based practice and outcomes assessment, and in response to the clear needs of local authorities and providers, The Centre for Outcomes of Care, led by Dr. Mark Kerr, undertook a rigorous 2-year review of needs and outcome assessment metrics that might be part of the solution.
Our work has highlighted an important opportunity for local authorities and providers in England to adopt the Transformational Collaborative Outcomes Management (TCOM) approach and assessment tools (primarily the Child & Adolescent Needs & Strengths (CANS) assessment) – already successfully used and proven in a growing number of countries worldwide but, so far, not taken up in England. This simple, shared vision approach addresses the most complex problems in the care system. It’s an important opportunity for the sector in England and the vulnerable people we serve.
