How will we review our Children and Young People’s Plan?
How we measure our performance
Our review process
Our review process is an essential part of our Children and Young People's Plan. It is about checking whether we did what we said we would do and asking ourselves if this made a difference to outcomes for children, young people and families. It allows us to check if we are still on track to achieve our improvement priorities. We can then adapt our planned action to respond to the new situation.
We have to review our Plan every year as a statutory requirement. In March 2010, we will review our action plans for 2009-2010 and set new action plans for 2010-2011.
We have chosen to carry out additional reviews every six months. This will allow us to keep a close check on our progress. During 2010, we will begin work to develop our next Children and Young People’s Plan for 2011-2014. The reviews that we carry out will contribute to this work.
Children, young people and families will be important participants in our planning and review processes. We will work with them to find out what difference our activities are making to them and to plan what we might need to do next. When we develop our new Children and Young People’s Plan for 2011-2014, we will ask children, young people and families to work with us to decide on our priorities for that plan.
We will endeavour to ask even more people about our new plan than we did for this plan.
We have a diagram to show this review process.
How we measure our performance
To be able to review our progress, we need to measure how well we are doing. The most important measure is what impact we have had on outcomes for children and young people. We mostly use national indicators to measure impact. These are performance measures that national Government has set up. They are numeric measures of how well a population of children and young people is doing.
There are one hunderd and eighty-nine national indicators in total. Nottinghamshire has chosen to focus on a number of key indicators as part of its LAA (Local Area Agreement). seven of these national indicators are part of its Children and Young People achieving their Full Potential theme. They are:
NI 50: Emotional Health of children
NI 55: Obesity in Reception Year
NI 78: Reduction in number of schools where fewer than 30% of pupils achieve five or more A*-C grades at GCSE and equivalent, including GCSEs in English and maths
NI111: First time entrants to the Youth Justice System aged ten to seventeen
NI 112: Under-eighteen Conception rates
NI 114: Rate of permanent exclusions from schools
NI117: Sixteen to eighteen year olds not in education, employment or training (NEET)
Another ten National Indicators relate to children and young people’s performance or attendance at school and we are required to report on these to national Government. There are a number of other national indicators that we can choose to use to monitor our progress.
For some areas of work there was no suitable national indicator. Therefore, we identified our own performance indicator to measure impact.
In some cases, we will also measure our performance by considering the quality of what we do. For example, we might need to ask children, young people and families about whether the work we do is helping them to improve their lives or we might get an independent person to carry out an evaluation of our work.
Target Setting
As well as defining performance indicators, we have performance targets to help us plan and review our progress. A Target sets out the change that we expect to see in how we perform over a period of time. This is usually defined as a change to the numbers or proportion of people achieving a particular outcome.
Targets are important because they allow us to decide what we want to achieve, and then to review our progress to see if it has been good enough. We need to set targets that are challenging but achievable. We set targets by reviewing our performance compared to similar areas and looking at previous performance to identify how well we are doing. For some of our performance indicators, we have targets already in place because they are part of our Local Area Agreement (LAA) or other planning processes.
For other performance indicators, we have not yet set firm targets. This is because we do not yet have enough information about how we are doing at the moment. For these performance indicators, we will monitor our performance during 2009-2010 and compare it with other areas. We will then use this information to set targets for 2010-11. For 2009-10, our target for these performance indicators will be to improve our performance relative to national performance or the performance of similar local authority areas.
