Ask any parent, or child, what a good outcome for a child would be and they are likely to talk about being ‘happy’ or ‘healthy’, ‘having friends’ or access to the things they need. Ask someone working in a quality assurance team in children's social care what a good outcome for a child could be and you could get the same answers, but you might also hear them talk about rereferral rates, missing episodes and offending of looked-after children. Trying to identify outcomes and outcomes measures in social care is challenging. It brings together a need to quantify the often unquantifiable within a context of having to demonstrate cost-effectiveness and efficiency (Hood, 2019; Clapton, 2021). So what happens, then, when you add measuring outcomes for contexts – like a park or school – to the mix? Ask any parent, or child, what a safe context for a child would be and they might first ask you what a context is. They might then talk about feeling safe in the community, having kind and loyal friends or schools where teachers care about the students. Ask someone working in a quality assurance team in children's social care what a good outcome for a context could be and they might struggle to answer. Perhaps where this chapter falls in this book (towards the end) is a good representation of where outcomes have fallen within the work of CS to date. Outcomes, as the name suggests, have been seen as coming out of and not a target to get to. Without a clear goal in mind, we are limited in our ability to design responses that seek to get us there. This means that CS work is often enthusiastically geared towards the who and what, not the why and how.

We – Jenny and Rachael – feel underqualified to be writing a chapter on outcomes. But we have found ourselves – or Rachael has at least – pulling on our proverbial wellies and trudging into the swampy lowlands of developing practice in this area (Schön, 1983). We have found that while theoretically we can articulate what we might mean by contextual outcomes, what that means in practice, and how we set about doing this, can be quite different.