Across child protection services, frontline staff are often making decisions in the hardest possible conditions: under time pressure, with incomplete information and high stakes on every side.

Get it wrong and the consequences are serious. A child may remain in danger. Or a family may be disrupted unnecessarily, with harms of its own.

There is also a triage problem. Some families need urgent intervention. Some need support. Some need monitoring. And some need less intrusion, not more.

In practice, those judgements already rely on reading signals from fragmented information and, in effect, making predictions about risk.

Predictive modelling aims to make that process more systematic. By analysing patterns in large administrative datasets, it can help identify which children may be most at risk of future harm.

With New Zealand’s social workers under more strain than ever, what are the opportunities of using these tools more actively – and what are the potential dangers?

NZ and predictive analytics

New Zealand is no stranger to predictive modelling, nor debate surrounding it.

More than a decade ago, it was among the first countries to seriously explore how predictive modelling could be applied to child protection.

Work led by Professor Rhema Vaithianathan and colleagues at the Auckland University of Technology........

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