Professional judgement is something we ask practitioners to exercise every day. But how does good judgement develop? What helps it, what gets in its way, and how confident are organisations in allowing practitioners to use it?
Practice rarely offers neat problems with obvious answers. Practitioners have to make sense of incomplete and sometimes contradictory information, weigh different perspectives, work with uncertainty and risk, and make decisions that can have profound consequences for the people they support. Judgement develops through experience, reflection, conversation, challenge and supervision. It is shaped by what we know, what we do and don't notice, the people around us, and by the organisations and systems in which we work.
Join us to think about some of the searching questions that are key to understanding ourselves as judges and decision makers:
How do we distinguish good professional judgement from confidence, instinct or habit? What helps us become better at making decisions when there may be no single right answer? How do we recognise and make use of knowledge that we may struggle to articulate? And, what happens when we reach different conclusions from thoughtful and experienced colleagues in our own and other agencies?
Organisations, as well as individuals and teams, carry responsibility for risk, consistency and accountability. So how do we reach shared judgements collaboratively across professional and organisational boundaries? What happens when systems become anxious and seek greater certainty? How do we retain the confidence to think freely while ensuring our reasoning can withstand challenge and scrutiny? And what kind of supervision helps people to think, rather than simply telling them what to do?
These are longstanding questions, but they are given renewed urgency by current changes across care, safeguarding and support systems. There is growing emphasis on relational practice, earlier help, multi-agency working, shared responsibility and professional autonomy. Whether through Families First, changes in adult social care, safeguarding reform or wider shifts in public services, practitioners are increasingly being asked to make sense of complexity together rather than rely on any one professional perspective, process or threshold.
In this CareKnowledge Live webinar, we want to create some space to think about judgement in practice: how it develops, how it is supported, how it is tested, and what it might really mean for an organisation to trust it.
Bringing together perspectives from research, practice and the law, we will explore what helps practitioners make good judgements when certainty is not available, and what organisations need to put around them if they genuinely want practitioners to develop and have confidence in their professional judgement.
