This guest blog is by Philip Gillingham. Dr. Gillingham is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland. He is a qualified social worker who has spent 27 years working in and conducting research about child protection services. Recent publications can be viewed at http://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/2576.
Serious ethical concerns have been raised about the development of the Predictive Risk Model (PRM) to identify children at the highest risk of maltreatment as they enter the public welfare benefit system. However, there are also serious practical problems with how it was developed which mean that it is seriously flawed. What follows is a brief and jargon-free explainer as to why it will not work, based on an analysis of the documents released about its development.