This document is designed to help to evaluate the quality of services to protect children and young people in Scotland. It outlines an approach to self-evaluation which can be used by senior managers, operational managers or practitioners who work directly with children, young people and families. It builds on ongoing work across all sectors to evaluate services and plan for improvement. At the heart of the document is a set of quality indicators, which will help professionals identify the strengths in their practice and where further development is required. The same set of quality indicators is used by inspectors in external evaluation of services thus developing a partnership approach to internal and external evaluation of services.
The structures, systems and local priorities of services for protecting children and young people across Scotland vary and are likely to change and evolve over time. These materials can be used flexibly in the context of the local situation in a way that ensures that key issues will be addressed. The approach to self-evaluation is generic enough to be used in, or customised to, different situations and across agencies.
Following the national audit and review of child protection and the publication of It’s Everyone’s Job to Make Sure I’m Alright (Scottish Executive 2002), the child protection reform programme was established. Protecting Children and Young People: The Framework for Standards (Scottish Executive, 2004) set out the commitment of the Scottish Executive to ensure improvement in services to protect children and young people. The Children’s Charter (Scottish Executive, 2004) identified what children and young people thought services should do for them when they need help. It included a pledge to children and young people which described what professionals would do to help them.
These quality indicators, in line with the approach taken in the Framework for Standards and the Children’s Charter, focus on evaluating the help children, young people and their families get and the impact services have on the lives of children, young people and their families, irrespective of who is delivering the service.
The quality indicators have also been developed within an overall structure for quality assurance. This overall structure is still being developed to provide coherence to the range of quality models used by different public services in any sector. The structure encourages those providing services to consider the quality of their work in relation to six key areas as follows:
Using a common set of quality indicators for self-evaluation and inspection helps to provide a common language and agenda for all involved in the evaluation process and makes the inspection process more transparent. It facilitates an open dialogue about evaluations and promotes consistency across different areas and different evaluators.