BERRI is the only online assessment tool to cover mental health, behaviour, emotional wellbeing, relationships, risk and attachment. It was created by a clinician with extensive experience working with children in care, those with neurodiversity, and children with complex care needs because of their experiences or disabilties. The items were first developed through focus groups with foster carers and residential care staff, and a variety of other professionals and individuals with lived experiences.
The BERRI is an easy to use online questionnaire designed to help identify children's needs, with tools to track how they change over time. This increases insight for carers, allowing them to make greater impact on the child's functioning and wellbeing.
You can see detailed analysis and advice about an individual child, or gain an overview of the data for a group or service, allowing organisations to evidence improved outcomes, and commissioners to choose the right placement.
BERRI has been refined and improved over 15 years, and can compare a specific child to data from 22,000 uses. Our rigorous research and data analytics is combined with the professional expertise of our clinical psychologists, so that as soon as you have completed a questionnaire you can generate a report with individualised feedback about the child's scores and advice about how to best support their psychological needs.
Our unique questionnaire asks about the child in everyday language that gets underneath behaviour. The comprehensive assessment covers five domains:
Using BERRI regularly lets you see the progress children are making in your care.
We recommend using the full BERRI at least four times per year, as this allows large changes to be identified and provides useful organisational data. The tracking system can be used daily or weekly to "zoom in" to target and track specific concerns or to see whether interventions are effective, and to "zoom out" to get an overview of the data, including a handy manager's report that colour codes who is making progress.
The BERRI system produces a number of different outputs to make the data immediately useful:
Automated report, giving scores along with basic advice about each of the 5 domains of need
Ability to identify specific goals to address, and track them in more detail over time
The ability to see progress over time for an individual, group or setting*currently available for residential, fostering, family support/edge of care, secure and supported accommodation only
The BERRI system can help to keep an overview of all children who are the responsibility of a particular organisation like a Local Authority or placement provider.
BERRI has a high level of satisfaction from users including:
Users tell us that by being able to generate the graphs and reports, BERRI saves them more time than it takes to complete. It also makes them look more professional, and more able to evidence that the service is effective.
Most importantly, BERRI improves outcomes for children. Placements using BERRI can evidence an average 14% improvement in children’s scores over six months of using the pathway, and this translates into more settled children, whilst staff feel more able to meet their needs.
"The holy grail of outcomes data that actually captures children’s wellbeing, with proper science behind it"
Social Finance.
The BERRI is "the missing link in the residential care sector"
Sir Martin Narey, government advisor who reviewed residential care in the UK.
