Self-evaluation, within the overall process of planning for improvement and excellence, helps identify current good practice and positive impacts and identify areas for further development. This publication provides a flexible tool which to promote best practice in self-evaluation. It can be used at any stage of service development. It can also be used alongside the Social Work Inspection Agency’s (SWIA) publication Guide to Supported Self-evaluation8 , and relevant material published by the Care Commission9.
Self-evaluation helps to:
When we self-evaluate, we look honestly and critically at our practice and at the services we provide with a view to improvement. Put simply, self-evaluation for improvement focuses on answering two key questions about our practice:
How good are we now?
This helps us to identify our strengths and development needs in key aspects of our work and the impact our work has on looked after children and their families.
and
How good can we be?
We ask this question to help us set priorities for improvement and to form a clear picture about what high quality corporate parenting would look like.
Self-evaluation, to be meaningful, has to focus on on-going improvements in outcomes. It is not a one-off activity which is done for its own sake. It is a dynamic process which goes on throughout the year. We can use self-evaluation to establish a baseline from which to plan to improve outcomes for looked after children. We can use self-evaluation as a means of ensuring our stakeholders’ commitment to set priorities and change. After we have taken planned action, ongoing self-evaluation helps us to monitor our progress and determine impact.
This self-evaluation guide uses the quality framework contained in A Guide to Evaluating Services for Children and Young People Using Quality Indicators. The framework is based around six high-level questions:
Each of these high-level questions relates to a number of QIs which cover the key aspects of the work of services for children. Each indicator contains illustrations which describe very good and weak practice. We can use these illustrations to check the quality of our own services.
The QIs and the six high-level questions can be viewed as a three-part model consisting of three inter-related areas:
The starting point in self-evaluation is to ask How good are we now? and consider the outcomes and impact which our service has on looked after children. We should look closely at the illustrations in selected QIs from A Guide to Evaluating Services for Children and Young People Using Quality Indicators. It is important that we evaluate the direct outcomes for looked after children and families rather than only processes such as the policies, procedures or other materials which we have developed. Developing policies and procedures may be useful, but they are means to more important ends: improvements in outcomes for looked after children and positive impact on their lives. We should then look at aspects of our work and the processes we use to achieve the outcomes and impacts we want for looked after children. In order to do this, we should select key QIs relating to the work of our service in the model above. By asking the question, How good are we now? we can begin to identify strengths and areas which we need to improve or develop further.
Improvement should be central to our self-evaluation. By asking How good can we be? we can set goals for improvement.
This diagram shows how self-evaluation contributes to planning for improvement.
An improvement plan will have:
Self-evaluation is a continuous process which we can use throughout improvement planning. We should use it to check our starting point and identify what we need to do. We should then use it to monitor our progress and check out the impact of the action we have taken on the lives of looked after children.