Introduction
What is the purpose of this resource pack?
This is a voluntary, online self-evaluation tool to help your children's trust board to improve governance and value for money. Studies by the Audit Commission and others have found more work is still needed to ensure there are effective arrangements for leadership, commissioning, performance management and managing resources. The self-assessment provides opportunities for your partnership to discuss your current arrangements. It sets standards for performance with explanations of why these are important and it signposts further information and guidance. Completion of the self-assessment generates an action plan to help the children's trust board set its own agenda for improvement.
The resource pack builds on the self-assessment from Are We There Yet? Improving Governance and Resource Management in Children's Trusts. It takes into account the changes introduced by the 2010 statutory guidance in Children's Trusts: Cooperation Arrangements Including the Children's Trust Board and the Children and Young People’s Plan
It sits alongside other Audit Commission tools such as this
Who is this resource pack for?
This resource pack is designed to be used at board, executive or sub-group level. It is for all children’s trust partnerships including:
- members of children’s trust board;
- elected lead members for children’s services;
- directors of children’s services;
- senior officers who are members of any children’s trust executive and board subgroups; and
- commissioners and joint commissioners of children’s services
How does it work?
The resource pack offers a self-assessment tool for children's trust boards and their constituent partners to review their effectiveness across eight themed modules. Partners can decide whether they want to review all eight modules, or if they want to look only at those they think are particularly useful to them. The module for each theme asks the board or partnership to assess itself against a number of statements. The assessment is simple – you are asked to what extent you think each statement describes cooperation arrangements in your children’s trust.
Once you have done this, you can generate an action plan for the improvements you need to make. Throughout the tool, links are provided to relevant guidance, legislation and case studies. These will be added to and updated regularly.
The eight areas are:
- Stakeholder involvement – Involvement of children and young people, families, carers
- Partnership – Working in partnership and partners’ responsibilities
- Leadership – Leadership, culture and behaviour
- Children and Young People’s Plan (CYPP) – Managing the Children and Young People’s Plan ·
- Governance of safeguarding – Governance arrangements for safeguarding
- Performance management – Performance management and scrutiny
- Value for money – Resource management and value for money
- Capacity and workforce – Capacity and workforce
How does this tool relate to other tools and support?
This tool sits alongside several other resources which will help you improve the impact of your children’s trust. These include the following:
There are also a number of tools on the Audit Commission website: Children and young people - Audit Commission
Using the resource pack
Carrying out the self-assessment requires the partnership to work together to agree a shared view. You will get most benefit from the self-assessment if you complete it as a group. This could be the children's trust board, the executive group or a sub-group of the board. Discussing your views on the resource pack standards as you go through them will enable you to reach a joint understanding of where you are. Your discussion will also help you to understand as a group any differences in perception and local concerns, which will provide useful action points in themselves.
Completing the self-assessment through a discussion will provide more value than simply completing the form, and we encourage children’s trust partners to consider doing this. You may want to consider commissioning a facilitator to help manage the discussion, and identify points for action.
This resource pack can be particularly useful when you are making changes to the children’s trust arrangements or the children's trust board. It is also useful when you have significant changes in membership, either of organisations or people.
Deciding which modules to use
You will need to agree in the partnership group which modules you want to look at first. We suggest you start with two or three modules which your partnership feels are most important or urgent to tackle. You might select a module because you think improving it will have most impact on improving the way your children’s trust works or because it is an area of identified weakness which poses the biggest risk to improving outcomes for children and young people locally.
Some questions appear in more than one module. This is to make sure they are covered where relevant, since you may not use all the modules. It does not mean you need to answer them twice.
Some standards contain more than one statement. Both need to be met to say the standard is fully met
Action Plan
Your self-assessment will generate an action plan, showing which modules need action. These are downloadable in Word and PDF format so you can cut and paste them into your plans. You can also add or substitute the actions your partnership thinks are needed locally.
Downloading the pack
All the modules, guidance and the action plan can be downloaded in Word and PDF format so you can print them out and work on them offline
Getting Started
To start using the pack, please click on the next button at the bottom of this page. Please identify your local area to help us record use of the tool.