ParentAssess Assessor Training

Children's Social Care require training to enable their social workers to complete assessments of parents with learning disability and additional needs to inform decision making about whether children can return to their parents' care. These assessments are regularly requested during family court proceedings and are specialist assessments which cannot be undertaken without training as the courts only recognise either PAMS assessments or ParentAssess assessments in relation to parents with learning disability and additional needs. Training internal staff to undertake these assessments means that costly independent ParentAssess assessments do not need to be commissioned.

Historically we have commissioned PAMS to train our staff but following a review of PAMS assessments vis-à-vis ParentAssess assessments a decision was taken at Strategic Level in February 2023 to train staff in ParentAssess in the future as this was deemed to be the preferred assessment framework (having trained a small group of staff in both and taken their feedback). Coincidentally, the founder of PAMS has just announced her retirement and this framework will not be available in the future as the software will no longer be updated and meet DCC IT compliance.