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Improving: Services to Protect Children

3. HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE

This guide uses a suite of QIs which have been selected from How well are children and young people protected and their needs met? to help us focus on, and improve how we assess children’s risks and needs.

By answering the question How good are we now? and considering the illustrations in the chosen QIs we can identify our strengths and areas for improvement. This is key to knowing if we are doing the right things, at the right time, and, in the right way in order that the children we come into contact with are safe and their needs met. The answer to How good are we now? will help us to see what is working well and where we need to take steps to improve. We can then take action and monitor and determine our progress. The answer to the question How good can we be? will help us to check our vision in relation to the overall vision for Scotland’s children and set achievable but aspirational priorities for improvement.

Effective self-evaluation is dependent upon gathering evidence from a range of sources. When gathering evidence about how well children’s risks and needs are assessed we need to consider how well we:

• recognise a child needs help;
• gather initial information;
• jointly investigate the concern; and
• assess the risk to and needs of the child.

It is important that we have sound evidence to inform the judgements we make. We should use a wide range of evidence to help us to evaluate how we are doing. The evidence we use will include:

• performance data collected nationally, locally or within a service;
• surveys of stakeholders’ views;
• direct observation of practice; and
• review of a range of documentation.

We should ask the questions How good are we now? and How good can we be? in relation to each of the QIs below.

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