Assessment is a complex issue for people starting out as social workers as the public perception of assessment and the practicalities of assessment are so different. Most people have a view of assessment which can be called The Expert Model. This means that the person comes to the expert with a problem. The expert asks questions, carries out tests, finds out the details, and then decides what is ‘really going on’. On the basis of their expert opinion, the expert tells the person what to do, and the person gets on and does it.

That is rarely the model of assessment used in social work. Rather than finding out what’s ‘really going on’, finding The Truth, good social work assessments are far closer to Milner and O’Byrne described when they suggested that most social work assessments are a search for “a pragmatic truth that fits social work situations in a way which is most satisfying for service users, the end product being a story that is helpful to all concerned” (2002, p4, italics in the original). Although this source is more than ten years old, and Milner and O’Byrne have not repeated this definition in later work, it remains a sound way of thinking about assessments.

Assessments have to be a pragmatic truth. This means that the test of a good social work assessment is not the extent to which it fits with the theories used to produce it, but the extent to which it works and makes sense in practice. It has to be ‘a truth’, not ‘The Truth.’

Assessments have to fit the situation. This means that a social worker will adapt their assessment to the unique circumstances of each person that they work with. Again, it is vital to stress that a social worker’s job is to ‘adapt their theories to fit the people they work with, and not to adapt the people they work with to their theories.’

Assessments have to be satisfying to the service user. This is such an easily missed point. If you work out a highly logical and theoretically sound explanation of a person behaviour or circumstances, but they aren’t satisfied with it, you will not produce a useful, efficient, or effective assessment. Learning how to adapt the service users’ theories to fit with your own so that both you and they are satisfied with the end result is an important social work skill.

The end product of an assessment is not a scientific theory or a set of facts, it is a story. This does not mean it can just be made up. It means that the assessment has to create a coherent narrative that gives some sense of why things are the way they are now, and how to get things how you want them to be in the future. It has to make the individual facts, pieces of data, and evidence fit together in a way that ‘feels right’ and creates a sense of direction for the work.

The key point of a social work assessment is how helpful it is. Does it help them enhance their well-being? Does it enable them to better face the challenges of life? Does it promote social justice? That is the bottom-line for social work assessments.

Milner and O’Byrne stress that it is important that social workers hold their assessment firmly, but lightly. Social work assessment should be firm enough to guide the intervention, whilst also flexible enough to cope with the inevitable twists and turns of what happens in practice.

Created by M. Allenby. Last updated by M. Allenby 21.8.16