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The Descriptive Tyranny of the CommonAssessment Framework: Technologies of

Categorization and Professional Practicein Child Welfare

Sue White, Chris Hall and Sue Peckover

Sue White, Professor of Social Work, University of Lancaster. Chris Hall, Reader, Centre

Applied Childhood Studies, University of Huddersfield. Sue Peckover, Senior Research

Fellow, Centre Applied Childhood Studies, University of Huddersfield.

Correspondence to Sue White, Professor of Social Work, Department of Applied Social

Science, Lancaster University, Room C154, Bowland North, Bowland College, Lancaster

LA1 4YD, UK. Email: [email protected]

Summary

The Common Assessment Framework is a standard assessment tool to be used by all pro-

fessionals working with children for assessment and referral. The CAF is hailed as a

needs-led, evidence-based tool which will promote uniformity, ensure appropriate

early intervention, reduce referral rates to local authority childrens services and lead

to the evolution of a common language amongst child welfare professionals. This

paper presents findings from a study, funded under the Economic and Social Research

Councils e-Society Programme. Our purpose in is not primarily evaluative, rather we

illustrate the impacts of CAF as a technology on the everyday professional practices in

child welfare. We analyse the descriptive, stylistic and interpretive demands it places

on practitioners in child welfare and argue that practitioners make strategic and

moral decisions about whether and when to complete a CAF and how to do so. These

are based on assessments of their accountabilities, their level of child welfare compe-

tence and their domain-specific knowledge, moral judgements and the institutional

contexts in which these are played out.

Keywords:assessment, ethnography, common language, every child matters

Introduction

The Common Assessment Framework (CAF) is a key part of deliveringfrontline services that are integrated and focused around the needs of

# The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of

The British Association of Social Workers. All rights reserved

British Journal of Social Work (2009) 39, 11971217doi:10.1093/bjsw/bcn053Advance Access publication April 16, 2008

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There are two main elements to the ISA initiative:

(1) A database of all children, made accessible to appropriate professionals,

on which they can indicate their involvement with a child and any con-

cerns they may have about that child. This index has been piloted in anumber of Trailblazer authorities. The planned national version is now

known as ContactPoint.

(2) The CAFa standard assessment tool to be used by all professionals

working with children for assessment and referral, which can be

e-enabled. The child and parent can make comments and indicate

consent to share information. The CAF is completed as a Word template

or on-line, and passed to other professionals as a standard assessment

and/or referral form. It is difficult to overstate the aims of the CAF. It

is hailed as a needs-led, evidence-based tool which will promote uniform-ity, ensure appropriate early intervention, reduce referral rates to local

authority childrens services and lead to the evolution of a common

language amongst child welfare professionals (e.g. Warren House

Group, Dartington Social Research Unit, 2004).

A third aspect is the role of Lead Professional, who co-ordinates the workof all services involved with a family. This is also subject to a current pilot.An additional major initiative currently being rolled out nationally is the

Integrated Childrens System (ICS). The ICS is intended to provide anelectronic record of professionals involvement with children from firstcontact to case closure. The CAF is likely to feed the ICS by providinginitial information and informing early planning and intervention.

There have been strong reactions to ContactPoint at all stages of itsdevelopment, from politicians (e.g. Earl of Northesk, 2004), the media(e.g. Carvel, 2004) and NGOs (e.g. Dowty, 2006; Brook, 2005). Criticalreports were published by the House of Commons, Education and SkillsSelect Committee (2005) and the Information Commissioner (2005). Theacademic debate on the child index has been conducted from several cross-cutting positions (Dow, 2005; Garrett, 2004, 2005a, 2005b; Hudson, 2005;Munro, 2005; Payne, 2004; Penna, 2005; Williams, 2004). Hudson (2005)locates criticism along three dimensions: technological, socio-legal andprofessional-cultural.

In contrast, the CAF has received relatively little criticism or attention(Penna, 2005, p. 155). Yet, dilemmas about information sharing andconsent also apply to the CAF, since it is here that such issues are initiallyaddressed. The CAF may also be seen to reconfigure professional practicein quite profound ways. In particular, it is designed to assess early concerns

and to apply to children who may have additional needs, estimated to beup to a third of the child population (DSCF, 2007, p. 5). Moreover, the CAFmay disrupt the traditionally storied child welfare professional accounts, inwhich facts and observations/perceptions are assembled in a temporal

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sequence typical of the narrative format. Professional texts have been foundto be arranged in terms of story structures that link characters and eventsand address specific audiences (Hall, 1997; Hall et al., 2006; Pithouse andAtkinson, 1988; White, 1998, 2002, 2003). Across the social sciences, the

ways in which experiences and explanations are displayed in narrativeforms have led some to claim it is storytelling that makes us human (e.g.Gubrium and Holstein, 1998, p. 163). In contrast, the CAF resisted narra-tive structures being split into a series of expandable boxes, with headingsand notes for completion, with little free space in which to integrate thevarious parts or set a context. Such a structure is in response to criticismsof case files that have been seen as unnecessarily long without appropriateanalysis. For example, according to Cleaver et al. (2004), by identifyingneeds rather than reporting concerns, a more scientific exercise is taking

placeit is evidence-based.The CAF Trailblazers have been evaluated (Brandon et al., 2006) showingsome predictable enthusiasm from committed volunteers. However, thereport also highlights potential misunderstandings about the purpose ofthe CAF and inconsistencies in use and professional competence. We willaddress some of these areas in the data analysis below, but our purpose inthis paper is not primarily evaluative; rather, we want to illustrate theimpacts of CAF as a technology on the everyday professional practices inchild welfare.

The fieldwork and local implementation

This paper draws principally upon fieldwork undertaken in four localauthorities in England. The main sites were two Trailblazer authorities:Metroland in the South East and Northtown in the North. Data fromthese sites were supplemented by additional data from two other authoritieswith similar characteristics to our main sites, where the CAF was in anearlier stage of development. The research took place during 200506.Details on the methods and the wider focus of the research are publiclyavailable on the ESRC, Society Today website (www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk/esrcinfocentre/viewawardpage.aspx?awardnumber=RES-341-25-0023).In brief, this was an ethnographic study, with researchers based for substan-tial periods in the two childrens services departments, undertaking obser-vations of meetings and day-to-day business, interviews and focus groupsand analysis of documents including the CAF. Fieldwork in the two otherauthorities was more focused, concentrating on particular research ques-tions, including quantitative measures. Although neither of these auth-

orities had Trailblazer status, both had established CAF pilot projectsduring the period of the study. Thus, an analysis was carried out ofthe characteristics of 280 CAFs across the four sites (Peckover et al.,forthcoming). Ethical approval was obtained from the University of

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Huddersfield and NHS Multi Centre research ethics committees and all theCAFs were fully anonymized in relation to the details of the children andfamilies. Before proceeding to analyse the CAF itself and its impact on pro-fessionals descriptions, we should give a broad indication of how it was

being used in each main site.In Metroland, the CAF is e-enabled and, in Northtown, it is not. When

the e-enabled version is operationalized, a professional is able to opentheir personal page on the website, see the CAFs they have completed,and amend if necessary. The CAFs are held in a central database. Twooptions are available to staff: an online version for those trained in and/or familiar with the technology; and a Word version for those who haveyet to be trained. In Northtown, the CAF is not yet e-enabled and, althoughavailable in template form for the user to complete as a word-processed

document, this is frequently downloaded and/or photocopied and com-pleted by hand. It is always, however, the paper version that is used forinformation sharing, whether transferred by hand, by post or by fax.Although practitioners are encouraged to indicate on the local childindex that they have completed a CAF for a particular child/youngperson, this requires separate engagement with a different set oftechnologies, and consequently is not always achieved in practice.

While there are early indicators that some services are requiring CAFs toform the basis for referrals, it is clear that different practices exist. Training

courses and government guidance encourage professionals to use the CAFfor assessment as well as referral purposes, and some services have adoptedit as their standard assessment tool (e.g. Sure Start). Metroland has requiredthat the CAF be used for all communications on children with additionalneeds and, by the end of 2006, over 1,000 CAFs had been completed, andstaff from education, health, housing and youth justice attended trainingsessions. Whilst it was expected that all professionals would use the CAF,the initial users were predominantly schools, particularly referring childrento educational psychologists and learning support. Health professionalswere slower to use them. Towards the end of the fieldwork, the CAFbecame the required method for referral to social services. In Northtown,the CAF has been introduced both more widely and more permissively,and did not initially replace other referral processes. Despite a strongemphasis on multidisciplinary working and an expectation that pro-fessionals across the childrens workforce will engage with these develop-ments, we found that private, and voluntary agencies in particular, havebeen slower to take up and use the CAF. There are particular difficultiesof access to appropriate IT facilities by such groups. Inevitably, thesuccess of a multi-agency implementation of the initiative has been chal-

lenged by the size and diversity of the child welfare workforce and the com-plexities of dealing with large numbers of organizations with differentpolicies, procedures and practices. Such a large whole-of-system approachis susceptible to both resistance and local differences in interpretation




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and usage. In short, in the Trailblazer sites, there was little common aboutthe use of the CAF.

In the two other sites, the pilot projects for the CAF displayed evengreater differences. Most notably, there was an emphasis on assessment

rather than referral, with children and parents making significant contri-butions to the process. In our sample of 280 CAFs, the main purpose ofthe CAF was for referral in 70 per cent of cases in the Trailblazers com-pared with 18 per cent in the other sites. One team used the CAF as a con-tract to reach agreements with parents on the proposed intervention. Whatwas particularly noticeable about these CAFs was that the audience was thefamily or colleagues rather than other professionals, with parents mostoften noted in the action points. In our analysis of the main purpose ofthe CAF, in this site, nearly half were for family work.

The two Trailblazers had extensive training programmes for potentialCAF users, comprising one-day events. Staff at all levels were involvedand from across education, health, early years, housing and youth justice.By the end of the research, 1,200 professionals had been on a trainingcourse in Northtown and 800 in Metroland. However, rather fewer hadactually used the technology. In Metroland, in particular, the training wasdelivered in terms of developing wider notions of assessment and infor-mation sharing rather than merely the use of the technology. In the non-Trailblazers, too, the pilot projects had extensive training, but, being pilot

projects, the numbers involved were small.We have described in more detail elsewhere (Peckover et al., forthcom-ing) the similarities and differences in the process of introducing CAF inthe different authorities. However, as we have said, our primary purposein this paper is to examine the ways in which the demands of CAF as apiece of technology impact upon and interact with the contingent sense-making and case-telling activities of child welfare professionals. Theform itself is, of course, the same across the sites. Thus, we will need toknow a little more about the sorts of descriptions the CAF demands ofform-completers.

The descriptive demands of forms

We have drawn here on a range of concepts derived from the work ofGubrium, Buckholdt and Lynott (1989), based on over a decade of theirown ethnographic work in human service organizations. Gubrium et al.describe what they call the descriptive tyrannies of people forms

forms used in one way or another to describe and categorize peoplecoming to the attention of human service professionals:

People forms are standardized papers that become documented descrip-tions of clients in need . . . experience is not simply known or conveyed




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to others, but takes on meaning within descriptive frames or contexts . . .theartfully rational method by which form completion gets done [occurs] in acontext of justification. In addition . . .the response of those concerned tothe consistencies and contradictions between what they know aboutclients and what they are requested to document [creates] the moral

context of form-completion. . .

people are not cultural dopes neither arethey moral dopes standing mute at the margins of everyday responsibilities(Gubrium et al., 1989, p. 197).

Thus, for Gubrium et al., the relationship of form completion to humanactivity is two-fold. They are concerned with:

(1) What sorts of descriptions forms invite or the reportorial expectations

assumed to underlie acceptable organizational description (Gubrium

et al., 1989, p. 197)?

(2) What are the rational, moral and artful capacities of form-completers?

That is, what wiggle room (Erickson, 2004, p. 20) do they have within

these descriptive demands?

We examine and illustrate these in turn and investigate the extent to whicha CAF writer attends to the scientific and technological constraints of theCAF, whilst simultaneously trying to tell their story.

Gubriumet al.argue that completed forms, like any mode of description,have transformative effects. They do not simply describe events as they

occurred in real time. For example, they may contain mutually exclusivecategorizations, which demand that the form-completer suspend disbeliefthat only one category can apply at any one time. We have already notedthat CAF is designed to be evidence-based, focused on needs and strengths,rather than concerns. Narratives are designed out. There is evidence of theofficial disapproval of narrative as form of case recording in various inspec-torial reports. For example:

It had been noted that the annual foster care reviews contained long narra-tives which the inspectors felt unnecessary (Commission for Social Care

Inspection, 2005, p. 35).

Professionals are encouraged to evaluate strengths, needs, actions and sol-utions for children across three domains derived from the Framework forAssessment of Children and Need and their Families (Department ofHealth, 2000)Development of unborn baby, infant, child or youngperson, Parents and carers and Family and environmental. There aresubsections, prompts and trigger questions provided under each of thesedomains. For example, under Development of unborn baby, infant, childor young person, there are seven subsections and further divisions within

these. Figure 1 is but a small extract from the development section of anuncompleted CAF.

The structure of the form promotes certain ways of sharing informationand reporting concerns. Split into a series of boxes with headings with




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notes for completion, the writer is forced to present information within a

certain structure and format. The child and familys attributes are requiredin terms of strengths and needs. Figure 2 provides a typical example of aCAF that was completed in terms of needs. It refers to a child with learn-ing disabilities.

Figure 1 Small extract from the development section of an uncompleted CAF.




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Whilst the boxes are expandable on the electronic form, there is noadditional given space for extra information. This was a concern formany professionals we interviewed during our study, who often struggledto fit the information they had about a child and family into the structureof the CAF. One of the sites added a background information section toeach domain as a result of feedback from users. As one Learning Mentorpointed out:

I still feel that you just need one little box for your extra. . .. Because theyare very structured around, obviously around the five outcomes [in EveryChild Matters] and things like that. Which obviously they need to be. But

Figure 2Completed CAF in a young person with learning disabilities focusing upon needs.




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theres always the bit of, you know, this is the extra bit that doesnt fit intothose boxes, it really doesnt (Learning Mentor in Primary School).

Like many forms in human service contexts, the CAF disrupts thetemporal and narrative display of information. There are no opportunities

for the writer to provide a chronological perspective on the case or theirinvolvement, nor to tell a story or characterize the child or parent. Someprofessionals particularly highlighted their frustrations at the constraintsimposed by the form and their attempts to express their concerns aboutchildren:

And a CAF doesnt tell a story. It feels to me a bit like school exams. Mul-tiple choice. You can tick the boxes with the right answer, but it reallydoesnt give you er the er . . . the story. It is about narrative isnt it. Itsabout peoples lives. It isnt about um dividing a life up into a lot of small

boxes. And when you put all those boxes together it will be EQUAL tothe narrative (Health Visitor).

You cant give your general history. There is nowhere where you can givebackground and thats so important I mean to me. If you. Thats whatpeople need to know. Its about the background and it goes straight intothose, you know those boxes which . . .I mean all youve had up to therehas been you know mother and father and siblings. But NO backgroundon that child. And because of the what this particular pupil had witnessedprior to that had a massive effect on WHY he was like he is. And obviously

without that information everybodys in the dark (Learning Mentor in aPrimary School).

I prefer a blank sheet of paper to express by thoughts (Sure Start Worker).

However, it was notable that nearly half of the CAFs in the sample main-tained a narrative structure to some of the information and over a thirdrelated a story to illustrate their point. These were often forced into existingboxes, often only partly relevant to the topic, and sometimes repeatedelsewhere on the form as if to emphasize the importance of the narrative.A typical example is given in Figure 3.

As well as disrupting story-telling, the CAF writers often found that theboxes did not enable them adequately to characterize the child and parents.As one teacher said:

The CAF does not describe [child], this is [child] [pointing to three files of

school papers].

In response, they tend to use the open sections to provide the coherent por-trait of the child they wished to display. They aimed to tell what the child islike, which they could not display in the boxes. For example, under the

Summary of Needs section, a teacher provides an overall characteristic ofthe child as troubled, with detailed characteristics of his behaviour andattitudes (Figure 4). At the same time, the characterization links directlyto agency action, school exclusion.




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In another example, the parents are characterized in the BackgroundInformation section (Figure 5). This is supported by quoting the parentswords. Here, the reported speech is a particularly strong rhetoricaldevice, since the words not only support the purpose of the CAF, a State-ment of Special Educational Needs, but also imply some degree of com-plaint by the parents that action has not already been taken. As De Fina(2003, p. 97) notes:

Reported speech in narratives presents a strong link with action in that char-acters that speak are also characters that stand out and actively take particu-

lar roles.

What we see then is the CAF writer deploying a range of narrative devicesto tell the story and display strong support for their point of view.

Figure 4 Characterization in the CAF.

Figure 3 Narrative within the CAF.




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Practitioners resisted the structure and format of the CAF. Only aroundhalf in our sample used the language of need, whereas over 80 per centtalked about concerns. Three-quarters provided background informationand 37 per cent reported a particular incident. They drew upon whateverelbow room was available. For example, some handwritten CAFs ignore

the structure, with information written across and beyond the limitsof the boxes. This was clearly easier to produce on handwritten CAFsthan those which were e-enabled. For example, a housing worker com-pleted the boxes in typed script, but a series of handwritten commentsare inserted in the margins. Some of these comment on the informationin the boxes; for example, next to the involvement of a communitymental worker is the comment havent been involved recently. More dia-logic comments are added in a large space using a personal frame:

I would really appreciate if you would provide financial support . . .[the cir-

cumstances of the case reiterated]. . .

. Hence your quick response would beappreciated knowing that you are dealing with high demands on daily basis.

The writer then provides a cell phone number, offers to come to the officeand signs the comments. In this way, the worker makes a clear distinctionbetween formal assessment and inter-professional negotiation.

The interpretive demands of forms

In addition to the descriptive demands, forms also make interpretive

demands upon the reader. There is some evidence that the disruption ofnarrative and chronology required by the CAF creates particularly vexinginterpretive demands. Despite the research team having extensive pro-fessional experience within social services and health, we experienced

Figure 5 Reported speech.




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these tricky interpretive demands ourselves as we examined the completedCAF forms. Whilst over three-quarters provided detailed informationabout a childs needs, it was often quite difficult to be able to discernwhat the case was really about. Questions such as well what is the

issue? and why has this form been completed? arose extensively. Thiscan be illustrated in Figure 2 above, where we are told a set of needs, buthave no idea of the childs personal life story, family, experiences and soforth.

During interviews, practitioners would employ detailed narratives todescribe a child and familys circumstances but this was often not portrayedwithin the completed CAF:

Because as weve spoken its easier to give a flavour than for somebody toread a CAF. I dont think the flavour of (name of mother) comes over at all

in that CAF. Which could be my poor quality CAF completing. Um lookingat it afterwards I think, well it does look very bold and not very complex.Maybe thats the failing of the CAF itself in that it doesnt enable you towrite how you feel (Health Visitor).

It is clear that the purpose of forms and schedules is to ensure that pro-fessionals attend to and record information deemed most salient to theirprimary activities as defined at this present historical moment. They aregenerally also presented as an aid to professional judgement. However,we have shown above that the descriptive demands of forms cause infor-

mation to be ordered in preferred ways, which can obscure as much pro-fessional activity as they reveal.

Form-filling in practice: everyday moral judgementin institutional context

There is a further organizational assumption generally made about forms,which is that they standardize professional activity. They are intended toensure that everyone does the same thing, at the same time, in the sameset of circumstances. This is particularly so for CAF, which is intended todo no less than create a common language. Our data show that childwelfare professionals do indeed strive to produce acceptable descriptionswithin the demands of CAF, but this process is, as Gubrium et al. (1989)argue, mitigated by the contingencies of everyday organizational life andoften by moral considerations. Let us look at some examples.

Some CAFs provided considerable detailed information about a childscircumstances, displaying adequate assessment information to guidefurther service delivery. About a quarter of the sample provided infor-

mation about the child that was rated as comprehensive (they wrotemore than two sentences). An example is highlighted in Figure 6, whichprovides a section of a CAF completed by an education head and submittedas a social services referral (see Figure 5). It was notable that this CAF was




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subsequently used by the local authority childrens services in place of theirown Initial Assessment, which they deemed unnecessary.

In contrast, about a third of the CAFs in our sample were completed in amore circumspect way, often with boxes left empty or providing limitedinformation. Practitioners reported a reluctance to comment upon areasof a child or family circumstances that they considered fell outside theirexperience or remit. For example, education staff frequently commentedupon the inappropriateness of providing information about housing or par-enting issues, as illustrated in the following data extract from an interviewwith a primary school teacher:

I tend to write more about the education because thats our area of expertiseand thats what we understand. And the housing and things, its difficult to

Figure 6 A section of a CAF completed by an education head and submitted as a social services

referral.




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know what are acceptable levels. you know, what is an acceptable level?What are good home conditions? What are poor home conditions?Because I know we have all got our own personal kind of thresholds onwhat, you know, my idea of what a clean house is maybe very different.So its quite hard because you are thinking well you know where are the

benchmarks, we dont know whereas when it comes to education and chil-drens health we know children and we work with them all the time so wefeel like we are in a position to be able to make judgements but its difficultin those areas that youve got very little experience of (Child ProtectionLiaison Teacher, Primary School).

Whilst the above example suggests practitioners make decisions to com-plete sections of the CAF depending upon their knowledge and experience,this was not always the case. Our findings suggested many exampleswhereby practitioners omitted to complete sections of the form even

though this was an area that reflected their professional knowledge. Forexample, health visitors who, despite having a professional remit concernedwith childrens health and development, did not always provide detailedinformation about this on a completed CAF. This was not an omission assuch, but rather a professional judgement that entering detailedinformation was not necessary or relevant to the individual and localcircumstances within which the particular CAF was being completed. Asone health visitor explained:

Im just looking at er health you see. All those are OK. Theres nothinguntoward to write. And in one sense you could say shes just um got veryordinary kind of problems. Shes a young mum, shes a new mum with

her first baby, and shes got a boyfriend whos being a bit of a pain,really. . . . Um. It did come in to family and environmental factors really,but there isnt, I find it quite difficult to give a full flavour in a few short sen-tences (Health Visitor).

Such professional rationalities were shaped by both the purpose andintended audience(s) of the completed CAF. This was particularly thecase when the form was used as means to refer concerns between agencies

and/or request additional services. Whilst this reflects an element of stra-tegic information sharing shaped by the local situation, it did placeadditional interpretative demands upon the reader. The particular CAFdescribed above was directed at the local authority childrens servicesdepartment, and, as the social worker said:

This CAF doesnt contain enough information.. . .Shes a health visitor soshe must know about health and development but there is nothing here(Social Worker).

Within the context of limited resources and high demands upon services,managers must often rely on the detail provided by referrers to makedecisions about eligibility. In practice, the lack of detailed information pro-vided on the CAF was often cited by managers in already stretched agencies




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Conclusions: CAF, information and noise

We have argued that CAF constrains professional practice in particularwaysit is indeed designed to exert its own descriptive demands, which

are intended to help and inform professional sense-making, but whichcan feel tyrannical to the form-completers. We have shown that CAFforms can be examined for their internal ordering, for the ways in whichform-completers assemble words and narratives and for what these linguis-tic strategies tell us about the institutional context of child welfare pro-fessional activity. We have argued that the organizational assumptiongenerally made about forms is that they standardize professional activity.CAF in particular relies on the assumption that it can foster uniform pro-fessional application and a common vocabulary. However, CAF forms

are transformations of other texts, other specialized and vernacular voca-bularies used when professionals talk amongst themselves. We know thatthese are usually narrative in form. Even an annal or chronology consistingof a list of dates with events is a potential story, since readers look to makesense of it and thereby are seeking narrativity:

Nonetheless there must be a story since there is surely a plotif by plot wemean a structure of relationships by which the events contained in theaccount are endowed with a meaning by being identified as parts of anintegrated whole (White, 1980, p. 13).

That is, professionals have their own ontologies, which the CAF seeks todisrupt in the cause of creating a common, evidence-based language ofneed. This language of need can create challenging descriptive and inter-pretive demands for the CAF writer and reader. In this regard, CAF maybe seen as a part of the information society in which knowledge isincreasingly transformed into information to enable electronic manipu-lation, transfer and storage. Lash (2002) notes how, in the informationage, there is no time for narrative nor discourse, as information is com-

pressed and digitalized, available for later users, but stripped of context:

Unlike narrative, information compresses beginning, middle and end into apresent immediacy of a now-here. Unlike discourse, information does notneed legitimating arguments, does not take the form of proportional utter-ances, but works with an immediate communicational violence.

Narrative concerns about context, character, events and process are aban-doned. Other writers see databases and narrative as enemy ontologies(Manovich, 2001). In research on the criminal justice system, Aas (2005,p. 83) concludes:

Risk assessment instruments can also be regarded as yet another example ofnarrative losing ground as the privileged form of cultural expression.




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For her, technologies, like sentencing guidelines, make use of categoricalidentities that place people into categories based on binary oppositionsthat obscure ambiguities:

Categorical thinking tends to go down a list, choosing between various cat-egories and requiring the choice of one. Each question narrows the focus of

the previous one. However, this kind of thinking omits the situated and thenarrative components of the various data, which explain the context inwhich data occur (Aas, 2004, pp. 3867).

This suggests a view of categorization that ignores the interactional natureof communications, to which many of our respondents referred. Categoriz-ation and particularization (Billig, 1985) have been seen as processeswhereby professionals categorize children and parents whilst simul-

taneously seeing them as individualshes like x but not quite x, usuallyillustrated with stories (Hall, 1997).The effects of the disruption of narrative tellings are potentially compli-

cated further by the contested and hybrid status of CAF as both an assess-ment tool and, it would seem, a mechanism for referral. It enters a childwelfare network that has received no extra resources and thus is completedand read strategically, like other artefacts within that network, with a mindto available resources and personal accountabilities. Professionals are notmoral dopes, and their form-completion activity is affected by their own

domain-specific knowledge, or lack thereof, and also by contingentstrategic, interpersonal and situational factors.Michel Serres argues that communications within a system are embedded

in a range of interpretive dichotomies, signal/non-signal, information/noiseand pattern/randomness (Serres, 2007), each with semi-permeable bound-aries. One reader/hearer may find information where another can find onlynoise. For Serres, this makes a common language not only unattainable, butundesirable, because noise has the potential to bring vitality and thehope of fresh patterns. The CAF may not provide a common language,because of the permeable interpretive interface. But, we should perhapscelebrate this failure, because the alternative has the potential tobecome a relatively noise-free bank of cant phrases.

It remains to be seen how the redescriptions demanded by the CAF playout, but, as an attempt at top-down governance of practice, it will probablyfail. As Bowker and Starr note, when classification systems are designedwithout attention to their situated use, common sense will be seen as theprecious resource that it is (Bowker and Starr, 2000, p. 32). It is the interac-tional accomplishment of understanding, or a communicative mindset(Reder and Duncan, 2003, 2004; White and Featherstone, 2005), that

makes the difference, and, for this, we may need a range of abilities, vocabul-aries and modes of representation. For interpretive beings, a simplistic goalof a common language is, and only ever can be, an ignis fatuousa superfi-cially enticing but ultimately ominous glow, which cannot contain the glare




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