Working Together With Families :
Outcomes and Evaluation
Malcolm Campbell
Programme Manager Total Family
The Outcome Framework and
TAF Action Plan
• The Outcome Framework focuses on long
term, strategic outcomes – demonstrating
change to the landscape of service
engagement
• Key areas include – resilience,
physical/emotional health, safety, economic
and educational attainment, relationships
• TAF action plan relates to individual outcomes
• TAF outcomes should relate back to the
Outcome Framework
Baseline Dataset
• Common set of data for each family, including
the control group
• Generic enough to be pulled of systems,
specific enough to be meaningful
• Includes – social care/safeguarding, health
visitor/school nurse contacts, crime/ASB
incidents, education and employment data,
probation data
• Linked to Negative cost tool to allow financial
comparison
Family Star Self Assessment and
Reflective Log
Family Star Self Assessment and
Reflective Log
• Family Star allows the parent to self assess
against 8 key areas
• Focus is on the parents role in the family rather
than child’s needs
• Highlights parents thinking around issues as
well as where change is needed
• Can support the development of a CAF
• Opportunity to review and show where
progress has been made
Family Star Self Assessment and
Reflective Log
• The reflective log is a tool for the lead professional and
others involved to highlight issues to be fed into the
local management group
• Highlights – new information, communication, activity,
progress, problems, family comment
• Allows small but significant issues and blockers to be
identified that may be missed by later evaluation
• Allows the professionals involved to provide a broader
perspective on how the case is being managed
Negative Cost Indicator Tool
• Allows costs to be attributed to service provision
• Comparison can be made between before and after
intervention
• While there is increasingly a focus on cost, this tends
to be at service and not individual level
• Linking the baseline data set and Negative Cost tool
allows costs to start to be identified
• Change in cost needs to be clarified – sometimes and
increase in cost in the short term is desirable
• Requires monitoring over a long period to demonstrate
impact
Negative Cost Indicator Tool
Key Issues
• Linking key strategic and service objectives to
individual outcomes
• Ensuring access to the data
• Ensuring lead professionals understand the link
between individual and strategic outcomes
• Balance between quantitative and qualitative data –
qualifying what change actually means in the
individuals context
• Data tends to be aggregated upwards and is then
difficult to drill down into – this makes gathering data
about the individual time consuming
Top Tips
• Embed outcomes and evaluation in the heart of the
process – this is what will inform and drive changes to
service delivery
• Ensure everyone understands the links between
individual and strategic outcomes
• Put in place the mechanisms for extracting data of all
kinds from the outset – don’t wait until the evaluation
• Ensure that numerical data is qualified to ensure you
know what it means