Managing child welfare agencies: What do we know about what works?

Child welfare agency caseworkers play a pivotal role in ensuring these children's safety and well-being, conducting initial investigations, making placement decisions and service referrals, and monitoring children's situations while cases are active. At this point, the empirical literature provides little guidance about how child welfare agency managers can best support caseworkers in these challenging functions. This article draws on available empirical literature to describe how agency management may affect children's experiences in the child welfare system and their resultant outcomes. The author notes what we may currently conclude from available literature as well as what knowledge gaps remain to be addressed. At this point the most robust evidence basis for agency management relates to human resource practices, but even these findings derive mostly from other settings and need to be tested directly in child welfare contexts. There is virtually no empirical evidence about how child welfare agency management affects children's outcomes over time.