What is the Cost Calculator for Children’s Services (CCfCS)?
The CCfCS is purpose-designed software that currently calculates the costs of social care processes and placements for looked after children. It facilitates comparisons between the relative value of different types of care, making it easier to estimate the potential benefits of introducing a range of alternative packages. Analyses of costs with respect to the outcomes variables included in the CCfCS are also available.
The model used in the CCfCS was developed as part of a research project that aimed to explore the relationship between costs and outcomes for looked after children (see Research and Development)
How is it being developed?
The current version of the CCfCS allows agencies to calculate costs of social care processes for looked after children.
Developments are now under way to extend the model to cover costs associated with other processes and agencies. Such a systems approach to cost calculations will make it possible to demonstrate how costs are spread across agencies, so that reducing the costs to one may increase costs to another.
The overall objective is to develop the CCfCS to incorporate unit costs for all services that children receive within specific time frames. These will include the unit costs of social care, education, health, mental health, socio-legal and youth justice processes so that eventually it will be possible to calculate the true costs to the public purse of providing services to children with extensive needs and to explore how these might be better configured to improve outcomes.
Functions of the CCfCS
The CCfCS:
- Collates - collates the descriptive information that a local authority holds on its looked after population and on its school children, which can then be related to activities which incur costs.
- Calculates- uses data on children’s characteristics, the unit costs of social care and education activities together with the allowances or fees paid for individual placements and education provisions as a basis for working out costs.
- Analyses - allows users to compare costs for groups of children with different needs over different time periods and to gain a better understanding of why certain children (or groups of children) cost so much more than others.
Key advantages
- Calculates costs from the bottom up
- Combines fee/allowance costs with the costs of social work support for placements
- Calculates individual costs based on the actual care history of each child
- Relates costs to children’s needs
- Presents results for any child, group of children or type of placement by any time period
- Analyses costs by outcomes, thus promoting the Every Child Matters agenda
The CCfCS approach to costing
The Cost Calculator takes variations into account: it costs each child’s pathway separately, revealing the huge variations between children, and it also groups children by combinations of need. The Cost Calculator uses a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down approach, aggregating costs from the actual placements and all the associated costs of each child, allowing you to clearly identify those children that are skewing the data. The Cost Calculator uses longitudinal, not snapshot data. By using data which local authorities already collect on all the placements of looked after children, and by carefully analysing the dates of placement changes, children”s age milestones, reviews, YOT services and other key services, the Cost Calculator can identify all the services actually required and delivered for each child as they pass through the various processes involved in being looked after by the local authority. This enables the Calculator to be used to examine any time period, either for the individual child, for groups of children or for types of placement, etc.