When we self-evaluate, we look honestly but critically at our practice and at the services we provide with a view to improvement. Put simply, self-evaluation for improvement broadly 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 children’s lives.
and
How good can we be?
We ask this question to help us set priorities for improvement.
Self-evaluation, to be meaningful, has to focus on on-going improvements to practice. 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 children. We can use self-evaluation as a means of ensuring stakeholders’ commitment to set priorities and change. After we have taken planned action, on-going self-evaluation helps us to monitor our progress and determine impact.
The eighteen quality indicators (QIs) in How well are children and young people protected and their needs met? cover the key aspects of the work of services involved in protecting children from harm. 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 can be viewed as a three part model consisting of three inter-related areas:
The vision which we have for our service should be a rounded and balanced view of what we hope to achieve for children. Our vision needs to link appropriately with the vision for Scotland’s children that children should be nurtured, safe, active, healthy, achieving, included, respected and responsible. As part of self-evaluation, we need to be aware that our vision is the main driver for our work. However, it is not necessary to evaluate our vision on a regular basis. It should be sufficient to check annually that we have a shared vision of the kind of service we aim to provide to children and the wider community.
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 children and their families. To do this we should look closely at the illustrations in selected QIs from How well are children and young people protected and their needs met? We need to evaluate the direct outcomes on children and families rather than indirect outcomes 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 keeping children safe and meeting their needs. We should then look at aspects of our work and the processes we use to achieve the outcomes and impacts we want for children and their families. In order to do this, we should select key QIs from the processes that make up 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 aspirational goals for improvement.
This diagram shows how self-evaluation contributes to planning for improvement.
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 we can use self-evaluation to check out the impact of the action we have taken on the lives of children and young people.
An improvement plan will have: