Some cookies used are essential to providing a service, while others help us improve your experience and provide us with insights into how the site is being used.
For more detailed information about the cookies we use, see our Cookies page.
Necessary cookies enable core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility. You may disable these by changing your browser settings, but this may affect how the website functions.
We'd like to set Google Analytics cookies to help us to improve our website by collecting and reporting information on how you use it. The cookies collect information in a way that does not directly identify anyone. For more information on how these cookies work, please see our 'Cookies page'.
We'd like to allow Social Media cookies to provide a richer experience. These cookies will allow us the ability to list Fife Council tweets and Facebook posts, Google maps, audio clips & Videos on some of our pages. Our videos use Youtube's privacy-enhanced mode.
These cookies allow us to show relevant adverts to the content you are viewing. They also provide the ability to deliver targeted online advertising across other platforms like Facebook, Google, Instagram and the Quantcast network.
In Child Protection in Scotland, a Discrepancy Matrix (often called Wonnacott's Discrepancy Matrix) is a tool for practitioners to analyze information by categorizing it into Evidence, Ambiguous, Assumptions, and Missing information, helping to identify gaps, challenge biases, and form robust plans within the GIRFEC (Getting It Right For Every Child) framework, particularly to assess needs against wellbeing indicators and strengthen protective factors. It's used in supervision and case analysis to move beyond surface-level understanding, explore professional curiosity, and decide on the right support for children and families.
Whether you use Discrepancy Matrix within the supervision or just decided that it will be a good tool to reflect alone on the information you have, the good starting point is to ask yourself questions such as:
The information is sorted into the four areas as you answer the questions.
For something to go into the ‘evidence’ category, it needs to be proven and verified (in other words, come from more than one source as a fact). Evidence also includes knowledge about legal frameworks as well as research. This category provides the strongest factual evidence for analysis and decision-making.
This relates to information that is not properly understood, is only hearsay or has more than one meaning dependant on context, or is hinted at by others but not clarified or owned.
This allows you to explore your own practice wisdom and also prejudices to see how this is informing the case. Emotion and values can also be explored in this area and you can explore how they are responding and reacting to risk.
These are the requests for information coming from the people listening to the story (supervisors, peers, other agency staff) that prompt you to acknowledge there are gaps in the information. The gaps then have to be examined to see if the lack of information might have a bearing on the decision-making in the case; if so, it needs to be explored.
Once the exercise is complete you may ask yourself:
