Developing locally held children’s safeguarding performance information
The Department has been working with the sector to create an agreed set of local child safeguarding performance information based on the recommended information outlined by Professor Eileen Munro in the Munro Review of Child Protection: Final Report. The information which we recommend local areas collect has been reframed as a set of questions local areas should challenge themselves to answer in order to understand and improve the performance of their child protection service. The approach of agreeing challenging questions to prompt discussion, learning and knowledge of impact, rather than prescribing, for example, that information is collected through standardised surveys, gives local areas greater flexibility to demonstrate their understanding in key areas. It also makes it easier to embed continuous feedback and improvement into their own local systems and work with partners.
While these questions have been published, the sector will wish to own and develop them over time. The Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS), the Children's Improvement Board (CIB), Ofsted, other Government Departments (OGDs) and Professor Munro strongly support this revised approach. They feel it puts professional judgement at the heart of the improvement process while ensuring strong scrutiny methods used by local areas. The approach is one that Ofsted agree can be embedded into inspection activity and the ADCS see as fitting within sector led support and challenge.
Matt Dunkley, President of the Association of Directors of Children's Services said:
"Robust datasets, and the questions that they raise about performance, are a vital part of any improvement process. Data alone cannot tell us everything that we need to know about a system as complex as child protection but does provide a sound foundation for identifying areas for improvement and good practice that others can share. The proposed combination of national data with more flexibility locally will help local authorities to compare their performance with others, while maintaining a strong focus on their own priorities. This dataset identifies the crucial questions that local authorities should ask themselves and each other, provides information about the child protection system as a whole and supports rigorous external inspection."
We are consulting to 16 April 2012 on how locally held information is used, as well as asking questions about the proposed data to be collected nationally. Alongside this consultation, the children’s improvement board are running pilots to test the feasibility of collecting the proposed local performance information and seeking examples from authorities that have already answered the questions posed in the local information section of the Munro framework.