This guide to self-evaluation and improvement builds upon the advice given in the publication How well are children and young people protected and their needs met?1 (A summary of the quality indicators from that publication is reproduced in Appendix I). Services and staff working within a local authority area who have responsibilities for protecting children2 from abuse and neglect can use this guide to help self-evaluate and improve the services provided. The guide helps users to recognise How good are we now? and identify what needs to be done to decide How good can we be?.
All staff who come into contact with children hold a responsibility for recognising when they are suffering or may be at risk of suffering harm. This guide should be used to help evaluate how well risks and needs are assessed. It is designed to be used by front-line practitioners such as social workers, public health nurses, police officers, teachers and other people working with children and families. In child protection, the process of self-evaluation and improvement requires both an assessment of how well each service is doing and an assessment of how effectively services are working together to protect children. This guide can be used within a single service as well as at inter-agency level across services, for example, by a local child protection committee.
The guide focuses on the importance of effective communication and information sharing between staff in individual services and between services to improve the arrangements for assessing risks and needs. It stresses the importance of partnership with parents, carers, and children. Quality partnerships between staff, services, and with families can help to effectively assess the risks to and the needs of children. The guide is aimed at staff with varied levels of experience in self-evaluation including those who are not yet familiar with self-evaluation processes. Self-evaluation, within the overall process of planning for improvement and excellence helps identify current good practice and positive areas of impact, and identify areas for further development. The self-evaluation questions contained later in this guide have been prepared to assist in recording the assessment of strengths and areas for improvement.
Assessing risks and needs of children can be difficult and can involve many services. This guide aims to support staff to look at their practice when they need to: