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THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN SCOTLAND ACT 2003
COMMUNITY PLANNING: ADVICE NOTE 9
Performance Monitoring and Management
MARCH 2004
Introduction
As set out in the statutory guidance Community Planning is essentially about bodies working together more effectively to improve their communities, ensuring that services are planned and provided with the needs of the people who use these services firmly to the fore. The emphasis of the Community Planning process goes beyond the establishment of joint vision in a plan and expects a Community Planning partnership to agree on:
- What they intend to achieve together, based on both national and local priorities.
- How they will achieve these priorities through the actions of the individual partners.
- How they will track progress.
Linking national to local
Local authorities and their partners are faced with the challenge of balancing:
- National priorities set by the Scottish Executive, which are delivered through action by local authorities and other bodies such as NHS bodies, the police and the enterprise networks.
- Local priorities which reflect the particular needs and aspirations of the people in their area of Scotland.
Community Planning offers a way of balancing local and national priorities by reaching explicit agreement about the priorities of the partnership, so that the activity of each agency can be clearly directed towards those priorities.
Shared information on current reality is the first step in agreeing on the priorities of the partnership ( see also Advice Note 8: Information Sharing). Community Planning partners also need to be able to assess the needs of their community appropriately and accurately. A key element of this is effective community engagement and this is discussed more fully in ( Advice Note 5: Effective Community Engagement).
Framework for agreeing targets for action and monitoring progress
Community Planning partnerships need to agree:
- What their priorities are and how they will translate these into outcomes.
- What actions need to be taken to deliver improvements.
- What indicators they will use to measure progress on these outcomes.
- What targets they will set themselves for improvement.
It is often relatively easy for Community Planning partners to reach agreement on the priorities for their area, but can be more difficult to agree the outcomes and what the targets should be for progress and how these can be measured, and who will take what actions to achieve those targets.
A number of partnerships have already developed targets and performance frameworks and some have published initial results. This provides a solid basis for further development.
The framework below has been developed by the Community Planning Task Force as a basis for discussion with the Scottish Executive and Community Planning partnerships and testing with a range of Community Planning partnerships.
Possible performance framework
The box at the centre of the framework represents the issues and related indicators which a Community Planning partnership decides to make its priorities. These are likely to be drawn from a combination of:
- Collective national priorities set by the Scottish Executive, which can be better achieved through action by a range of key agencies. Local outcome agreements could provide one mechanism for agreeing which of these priorities should be reflected in the community plan (since particular national priorities will apply to different extents in different areas), and what targets are appropriate in the local area. This is likely to involve a dialogue between the Scottish Executive and the Community Planning partners. It is likely that the national priorities will need to be streamlined and co-ordinated for this approach to work in practice.
- Local priorities identified by the partnership over and above the national priorities, again linked to indicators and targets to allow progress to be monitored.
The plan may well include separate targets for specific sections of the community, defined either as communities of place, such as particular neighbourhoods which the partnership wants to concentrate its efforts on, or as communities of interest, such as young people, women or ethnic minorities.
The shared priorities agreed by the Community Planning partnership are then tracked through targets for the actions of each individual agency that will contribute towards achieving the priority, based on evidence of what works. Each body would also have Performance Indicators for the functions and services which it carries out alone, as at present.
This approach seems to be working well for community safety partnerships, where the monitoring framework is based on an agreement of what each agency will do to contribute towards the partnership's agreed priorities. An example is set out below.
Tracking changes- Falkirk Community Safety
Next Steps
In order to develop this framework to make it useful in practice, the Task Force had set out 3 key areas of work:
- For the national priorities, we have mapped the key sets of cross-cutting indicators.
- Social justice: 29 Social Justice Milestones, addressing five major population groupings.
- Economic development (Smart Successful Scotland): 12 lead measures, addressing three national priorities.
- Health (The NHS Performance Assessment Framework): around 120 indicators, addressing seven headline issues.
- Education (Standards in Scotland's Schools): at least 50 headline indicators, addressing five national priorities.
- The environment: 42 indicators, addressing three national priorities.
The intention is to identify the ground covered by these indicators, particularly any overlaps which may exist, as a basis for discussion between the Scottish Executive and Community Planning partnerships to agree specific local targets for inclusion in community plans.
To aid planning for local priorities, we envisage a menu approach covering the most common areas included in community plans, drawn from existing sources such as LA21. The main aim is to help Community Planning partnerships to identify appropriate indicators for their local priorities by producing a menu of indicators which have been tried and tested in a variety of settings. It may also be possible to support the use of these indicators in a range of ways:
- Agreeing common definitions to enable comparisons over time and with other partnerships.
- Supporting the development of better data through the Neighbourhood Statistics Initiative.
- Establishing a clearing house for comparative data.
Further Advice will be issued as these tasks are completed.
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