Completing social work chronologies: Practice Tool (2022)

Introduction

Chronologies are a vital tool for practitioners working with children and their families, supporting practice in a number of different ways. They are crucial to: 

• capture significant events in the child and family’s life 
• consider the child’s felt and lived experience 
• understand the source of actual and potential harm impacting on children and young people
• identify protective factors and to decide next steps for intervention in a range of contexts. 

Compiling and analysing chronologies serves as a foundation for relationship-based practice as they provide an overview of what has happened in families' lives, aid understanding of what their experience of services and professionals might be, what can be learnt from this, and how this can be worked with to effect change in the future. 

Completing a chronology is a complex activity. Social workers need to decide what constitutes a ‘significant event’ and how much detail to include. This is compounded by the reality that they need to meet multiple purposes, from evidencing threshold decisions for court to sharing elements of a child’s life story with foster carers. Guidance regarding their completion has sometimes been contradictory, from Lord Laming’s (2003) recommendation following the death of Victoria Climbie that they should be ‘comprehensive’, to the updated guidance by Sir James Munby (2013) that they should provide a ‘succinct summary’. The pressure of day-to-day practice means that they are completed in different circumstances, with some updated on a day-to-day basis, with others collated retrospectively from case notes going back months, or even years. 

This guide aims to support social workers and their managers to navigate these complexities by providing an overview of the process that should be applicable to a range of contexts. It explores why chronologies are helpful, offers practical tips on completing them and includes tools to promote reflection and analysis of the information gathered. Overall, it will enable social workers and managers to understand and apply chronologies for assessment, planning and review with children and their families. 

Chronologies: a tool for multiple purposes 

Completing, analysing and utilising chronologies can play a significant role in supporting social work practice in a number of different ways. 

Completing chronologies in practice: the process 

The central principle that provides a foundation for all social workers completing chronologies is that they are a process that should run alongside all involvement with children and their families. It will be helpful for practitioners to understand working with chronologies in three main stages: 

• opening and maintaining 
• reviewing and analysing 
• utilising and presenting information.

How to compile a chronology 

A chronology is a list of events that have occurred within a family in date order providing the date of the event, brief detail of what the event was and the source of the information where required, and the significant of this event. Overall, the chronology should provide a prompt, concise and visual outline of significant events based on the facts. 

Where children are receiving support from more than one service, this running order of events should be multi-agency with each agency contributing, and the social worker taking the lead in pulling the information together and taking care to identify the source for each entry. 

Significant events should focus on the circumstances that had a positive or negative impact on the child. 

They might include: 

• Key dates of birth, deaths, marriages, co-habitations, relationships. 
• Childhood history of parents. 
• Transitions and life changes, house moves, changes of carer, contact arrangements. 
• Social care intervention - Injuries, neglect of care, incidents of hospital admission, parental incidents including domestic abuse, substance use, violence, criminal history. 
• Incidents of racism and oppression. 
• Key professional interventions, what’s been tried, missed appointments, engagement, other professionals involved. 
• The child’s voice – when seen, observed behaviour, views sought. 
• When the child has been provided with explanations and what words were used. 
• Family and organisational responses to intervention. 
• Outcome of referrals and actions taken. 
• Child’s health history, immunisations, injuries and hospital admissions. 
• Education, training and employment including achievements, qualifications, changes of school, periods of exclusion, absence. 
• Changes in the child’s legal status and placement history of children in care. 
• Events of religious/cultural significance i.e. baptism, bar mitzvah. 

The information recorded in chronologies should be succinct and to the point. Practitioners should avoid an indiscriminate transfer of case recording as too much information is likely to lessen the chronology’s effectiveness and impact. Usually, two or three sentences detailing the incident or event and its significance will be sufficient and help social workers identify relevant patterns when it comes to analysing the information at a later point. 

Social workers should remember that the chronology will be shared with the family and potentially the child when they are older, so it should be written in accessible language with jargon and acronyms avoided. 

Each incident within the chronology should be colour coded to a ‘RAG rating’. This means using different coloured fonts for chronology entries. The RAG Rating will comprise of: 

This should provide a visual aid for social workers to notice patterns of events and potential escalation in harm and the level of risk and times of greater protection for the child easier to identify. Practitioner analysis should also be used here to consider what the level of risk and impact of each incident is for that specific child.

Analysing a chronology 

It is crucial that social workers, their managers and the professional network take time to explore and analyse the information and consider what it means for the child and their family. Marion Brandon in her Biennial Review of Child Deaths and Serious Injuries wrote ‘It is what is done with the information rather than its simple accumulation that leads to more analytic assessments and safer practice’ (Brandon et al., p3, 2008).  

Taking the time to explore the meaning of the information requires practitioners to step out of reactive, crisis-driven work where the only questions asked might be in relation to immediate, current involvement and risks, to a broader understanding based on the history and likely trajectory for the child and family. 

Children’s Services need to establish an organisational culture where chronologies are recognised as a core social work task with protected time to update and maintain them. The expectation needs to be established that they will be drawn upon as an integral part of key meetings including supervision, child protection, legal planning and children in care reviews. 

Social workers and their managers may benefit from utilising reflective questions to explore hypotheses, effectively analyse and make meaning from the information gathered. The response to some of these questions can be utilised and integrated into comprehensive assessments. 

Preparing and presenting chronologies for different contexts 

An important process is to prepare and present this information depending on the context. A social worker’s role in the life of the child and the child’s changing circumstances over time means that the ongoing running order of events will need to be prepared and presented for different purposes. This might range from finalising a chronology for use in legal proceedings to one that might be used to support therapeutic life story work with the child. This stage in the process will rely on social workers and their managers considering the purpose of the chronology, who it will be shared with, and what information will need to be prioritised for this purpose. It will also be important to consider if there is any confidential or sensitive information that may need to be excluded in each context.

In respect to preparing a chronology for legal proceedings Sir James Munby, President of the Family Division at the time that the Public Law Outline was introduced, stated: 

We must get away from previous practice. All too often…. local authorities are filing enormously voluminous materials which are not merely too long; too often they are narrative and historical, rather than analytical…local authority materials can be much shorter than hitherto, and they should be more focused on analysis than on history and narrative…We do not want social work chronologies extending over dozens of pages (Munby, 2013, p. 4). 

Chronologies prepared as evidence in proceedings should be concise. The guidance suggests that significant events should only cover the previous two years, with events prior to this being grouped together and included as one entry in date order. 

The example below shows how to achieve this: 

In the context of life story work chronologies may be adapted and prepared to emphasise events significant to the child’s identity and life story. Sometimes social workers may use the chronology as a basis for writing a ‘later life letter’ or narrative for the child. Information in chronologies for this purpose might have less emphasis on individual incidents of concern, which may be more appropriately summarised. Instead, they may highlight information related to family history, celebrations, relationships, and key changes for the child that can be drawn upon in direct work and shared with their carers and network to support their understanding of their identity. 

Rose (2012) describes how to methodically present key events in children’s histories by breaking this down into ‘bite-size chunks’. Rose presents key events in the form of ‘movement boxes’ to enable each piece of information to be considered separately and enable the practitioner to generate questions in relation to each event. 

Example of ‘movement boxes’ 

This process provides the foundation to prompt questions regarding what additional information the practitioner will need to undertake life story work and the questions the child may have. This can help the practitioner identify how they might access this information and support the child within the work. Presenting information in this way can help practitioners appreciate the number of changes in children’s lives and likely impact on them over time. 

Conclusion 

Chronologies are a critical tool to support social work practice with children and their families. They provide a foundation for relationship-based practice and identify patterns of risk, harm and protective factors and how they have occurred over time. They also help plan next steps for assessment and intervention. 

Chronologies need to be opened, maintained and updated on a regular basis; analysed and reviewed in supervision and relevant meetings; and presented in a range of contexts including child protection conferences and care proceedings. Information contained in the chronology needs to be succinct, recording key events and impact on the child.

This practice tool supports practitioners to understand how chronologies can be helpful and identifies the process of compiling, analysing and presenting chronologies within their work. Children’s Services need to work to develop an organisational culture where chronologies are an expected, integral part of day-to-day work with children and their families and utilised in a range of contexts.