Peter Watson

Peter Watson joined the National Child Welfare Resource Center for Organizational Improvement as an Associate Director in October 2001 and his work focuses on quality assurance in the child welfare field. He has extensive management, research and policy experience related to quality assurance and child welfare, as well as broader children and families' issues.

Peter served as the Director of Quality Assurance at the Massachusetts Department of Social Services for three and a half years. During that time, he managed DSS's research, training, policy and foster care review units, and he also served as the project manager for DSS's SACWIS development and implementation, known as the FamilyNet system. DSS relied on a series of monthly and quarterly management reports as the backbone of its quality assurance system, and Peter worked intensively with DSS managers from the Regional and Area Offices, FamilyNet managers and programmers, and DSS data analysts to recalibrate and validate the reports after FamilyNet implementation occurred. He also oversaw efforts to implement training, policy and foster care review initiatives that reflected the needs identified through the quality assurance process.

Before working at DSS, Peter attended the Kennedy School of Government where he devoted his Master in Public Policy studies to children and families' issues and conducted a study of DSS's foster homes as his Master's thesis. Earlier in his career, he focused on the research side of child welfare through his work with several evaluation research firms in Washington, D.C. He designed and conducted a number of public sector evaluations, most of them focusing on child welfare and runaway and homeless youth programs.