Impact Assessments was created using a wealth of empirical research undertaken by the Impact team before development. This team consists of social workers, forensic psychologists, and several other experts in children’s social care. This expertise, along with extensive conversations with family court administrations and a senior circuit family court judge, has created a tool that will tailor each assessment to every type of family unit whilst maintaining a parent-centred approach.

The Impact Assessment is a user-friendly application used to create a robust, honest, evidence-based parenting assessment compiled in partnership with the family. The assessment is a time-saving, interactive application that enables both learning and assessment to take place, providing clear evidence-based outcomes that enable reports to be produced that will contribute to next-step planning.

The Impact Parenting Assessment consists of:

• 18 different assessment areas that mark parents’ skills as ‘achieved independently’ or ‘ongoing support required’. All observations can be recorded quickly, efficiently, and discreetly.  These observations form the foundation of the Impact Assessment.
• Safeguarding Alert System and Action Plan for each family.
• The ability to monitor parents’ mental health throughout the process by the completion of a Wellbeing Assessment, supplemented by regular Wellbeing Check-in sessions.
• A ‘Heatmap’ is an easy, diagrammatic indicator to show families and the social work team how the assessment is going.
• Weekly Summary Reports and the option to produce a Midpoint Report.
• Three stages of knowledge questions, in the beginning, in the middle of the assessment and at the end, to showcase any consolidation of learning that has taken place with a data matrix to present strengths or gaps in knowledge
• Option to include a full family history and any underpinning assessments (such as cognitive, psychological or behavioural assessment) in the final report.

Learn about IMPACT here.