It explores why chronologies are helpful, offers practical tips on completing them and includes tools to promote reflection and analysis of the information gathered. This guide aims to support social workers and their managers to navigate these complexities by providing an overview of the process that should be applicable to a range of contexts. The pressure of day-to-day practice means that they are completed in different circumstances, with some updated on a day-to-day basis, with others collated retrospectively from case notes going back months, or even years. Guidance regarding their completion has sometimes been contradictory, from Lord Laming’s (2003) recommendation following the death of Victoria Climbie that they should be ‘comprehensive’, to the updated guidance by Sir James Munby (2013) that they should provide a ‘succinct summary’. This is compounded by the reality that they need to meet multiple purposes, from evidencing threshold decisions for court to sharing elements of a child’s life story with foster carers. Social workers need to decide what constitutes a ‘significant event’ and how much detail to include. identify protective factors and to decide next steps for intervention in a range of contexts.Ĭompiling and analysing chronologies serves as a foundation for relationship-based practice as they provide an overview of what has happened in families' lives, aid understanding of what their experience of services and professionals might be, what can be learnt from this, and how this can be worked with to effect change in the future.Ĭompleting a chronology is a complex activity.understand the source of actual and potential harm impacting on children and young people.consider the child’s felt and lived experience.capture significant events in the child and family’s life.

Chronologies are a vital tool for practitioners working with children and their families, supporting practice in a number of different ways.

Purpose of a genogram in social work