As far as we are aware there is no comparable product on the market that combines financial data, details of the care histories of individual children, the real costs of their social care and data on the outcomes those children experience.

Financial analyses tend to focus on aggregate expenditure on particular types of placement either at a point of time or over a fixed period (usually the financial year), without considering the care paths of the children which lead to those placements and the true cost of the social work which supports the placements.

The Cost Calculator takes a ‘bottom-up’ approach, costing each of the processes involved as each child starts to be looked after and moves between placements. It combines the true costs of social care activity with the fee and allowance costs of placements. It also uses real longitudinal data based on the actual placements of each child and can be used to analyse those placements and their cost over any length of time.

The Cost Calculator has emerged from more than 5 years of detailed research and an enormous amount of design and testing in the attempt to produce a tool that can be used by all local authorities.

The Cost Calculator is very flexible and produces detailed analyses as specified by the user. Because it provides a standard way of analysing processes, calculating costs and presenting results, the Cost Calculator has great potential benefit for making comparisons between authorities and with national norms and standards.

In addition to the calculations, the Cost Calculator includes a vast array of data on placement costs, salaries, overheads and social work inputs, available both for London and out-of-London authorities. These data were refined from extensive work in 6 local authorities, tested in a further pilot authority and modified to reflect the results of research in several other local authorities.

The particular advantage of the inclusion of the research data is that it enables local authorities to begin work immediately with their data on children and placements without having to conduct a prolonged and difficult exercise to time and cost all their specific social care inputs.

The Cost Calculator is not a one-off product, but a tool which can be used repeatedly, either for regular planning, budgeting and commissioning, or for one-off in-depth attempts to solve particular problems.

The Cost Calculator is supported by its user community who are actively involved in improving and developing it, and extending it to include other services to children. Participation is through an on-line user forum, an annual user group meeting and involvement in our ongoing research and development programme.