The Gladsaxe Model — Denmark's Halted Points-Based Child-Welfare Risk Score

Around 2018, the municipality of Gladsaxe, on the northern outskirts of Copenhagen, piloted a predictive risk-scoring tool — since known as 'the Gladsaxe Model' — alongside two other unnamed Danish municipalities.

The tool assigned numeric points to family circumstances to flag children for early social-services intervention: parental mental illness scored 3,000 points, unemployment 500, a missed medical appointment 1,000, a missed dental appointment 300, and parental divorce also contributed to a family's cumulative score. Families crossing a threshold were to be referred for closer follow-up by child-welfare caseworkers.

A separate follow-on research project at Aarhus University that attempted a similar approach drew comparable criticism.

Denmark's data protection authority, Datatilsynet, denied the municipalities permission to continue processing data this way in 2019, and following critical press coverage the pilot was halted without the municipality publishing any outcome or accuracy statistics — the complete absence of published performance data is itself one of the model's most consistent independent criticisms.

The Gladsaxe Model resurfaced in November 2024 when Amnesty International's 'Coded Injustice' report on Denmark's automated welfare state cited it as a named example of opaque risk-profiling in child protection, warning it and similar tools risked discriminating against disabled, low-income, migrant and minority families. Denmark's Parliamentary Ombudsman opened a formal inquiry into the Gladsaxe Model and related systems in June 2024, examining discrimination concerns and citizens' notification rights; that inquiry remained open as of this writing.