How Current Data Can Help Us Measure Progress Toward a Home for Every Child

Ensuring that children experience safe, stable, and family-based homes is a shared priority across the child welfare field and a central focus of the federal A Home for Every Child initiative. Advancing this goal requires clear, practical information about how child welfare systems operate at key decision points and the degree to which existing data help us better understand children’s experiences of safety, stability, and permanency.

This report presents a decision-point framework for assessing progress toward A Home for Every Child. It examines what current federal data can and cannot show about children’s experiences, identifies gaps that limit our understanding of the full scope of those experiences, and highlights opportunities to strengthen measurement in ways that improve usefulness without increasing reporting burden on states and Tribes.

Why this matters now

• A Home for Every Child has already moved from concept to implementation. Early state participation in A Home for Every Child and the planned use of foster-home-to-child ratio and related metrics create an immediate opportunity to clarify which measures can best support learning, interpretation, and course correction as implementation unfolds.
• States and Tribes are being asked to demonstrate progress toward A Home for Every Child, but some rely on data systems that were not designed to capture key factors such as service availability, placement capacity, or placement fit. As a result, progress can be difficult to assess using existing measures alone.
• Current federal and state performance and improvement efforts increasingly emphasize outcomes across multiple decision points, rather than single indicators, creating demand for clearer, more interpretable measurement that supports learning rather than compliance.
• States and Tribes are seeking measures that support learning and continuous improvement without expanding reporting requirements or relying on metrics that are difficult to interpret in practice.
• Renewed attention to prevention, kinship placement, and timely permanency has highlighted gaps between what existing federal data can tell us and what federal, state, and Tribal decision makers need to understand to act effectively.

A decision-point framework for measurement

Progress toward A Home for Every Child unfolds across key child welfare intervention points as systems respond to concerns about children’s safety and well-being. This report organizes measurement around three decision points:

• Can children remain safely with their families? Federal data provide insight into maltreatment reports, recurrence of maltreatment, and foster care entry, but these indicators have known data quality challenges. Federal data also provide limited information on the availability, timeliness, and intensity of family preservation services that support children remaining safely at home.
• When removal is necessary, are children placed first with kin or, when that is not possible, in other family-based settings that can meet their needs? Existing data describe overall rates of placement with kin, but they provide limited insight into how quickly kin are identified and selected as the first placement. Further, existing federal data provide limited information on the availability of kin and non-kin foster homes and whether the available placements have the capacity—and willingness—to keep siblings together and serve children with higher support needs.
• Once in foster care, do children experience safety, stability, and timely permanency? Federal data can measure placement stability, safety while in foster care, length of stay, and exits from care. These indicators require careful interpretation because placement changes may reflect positive transitions and because permanency timelines are shaped by multiple factors, including the time needed to support safe reunification.

Cross-cutting data considerations

Across all three decision points, federal administrative data are well suited to describing, at a high level, children’s experiences and system responses. Taken together, however, the framework highlights several limitations that affect interpretation across the child welfare continuum, including limited information on:

• Service availability and intensity
• Placement capacity and fit
• Reasons for placement changes
• Context surrounding permanency timelines

Looking ahead

The report presents illustrative measurement options that are aligned to each decision point, ranging from measures that can be constructed using existing federal data to early concepts that would require testing and refinement. Together, these options demonstrate how a small, complementary set of measures can provide clearer signals of progress toward A Home for Every Child. Understanding what existing federal data can and cannot show is especially important as states and Tribes are asked to demonstrate progress using existing federal data systems that were often not designed to capture service availability, placement capacity, or placement fit.

Prioritizing a small set of high-value indicators, refining existing measures, and strengthening data quality can help the field better understand what supports children’s safety, stability, and permanency. Federal data can provide important insight into children’s experiences, while research and analyses conducted by states and Tribes add critical context that federal datasets cannot capture. Collaboration among federal, state, and Tribal partners; researchers; and families can help ensure that these measures provide clear and actionable signals of progress toward A Home for Every Child.