We had a meeting on Friday where we looked further at how we could use outcomes as drivers of our new service improvement plan.

It was good to give this topic a significant amount of time and it looks like we are making progress.

We have agreed that each part of our plan will have:-

– an overall outcome, e.g. Every school will achieve a very good level of performance in Learning and Teaching. This replaces the aim or objective section.

– a desired impact, e.g. Children will experience a consistently high level of education. This is the “why are we doing this”

– measurable outcomes, e.g. we will identify a range of outcomes which will relate to the overall outcome. It will be important that these outcomes are well balanced and possible to gather.

– the actions, e.g. develop learning teams in every school.  In the school’s version of this we will be less interested in the actions and maintain our focus upon the outcomes.  Hopefully this will free up some of the bureaucratic demands from which the planning process often suffers.

In the past the success criteria (OUTCOMES) came tagged on at the end of the planning process.  What we are proposing is that the process is actually driven by the outcome and desired impact.  I hope to have completed a draft version of our plan for general consideration by the middle of February.

We are replacing the National Priorities as the strcutural framework of the plan with the UN Conventions rights of the child: Safe and Nurtured; Achieving; Included; Healthy and Active; and Respected and Responsible. The example given above would fit within the Achieving dimension.

So much of this relates back to something I encountered last summer relating to Social Return on Investment.