CAAs and LEAs
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The Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) provides an assessment of how well local public services are serving communities in three sentences or less: It evaluates outcomes for local residents by assessing how public services work together to address local priorities, the prospects for improvement, and sustainability, with a focus on the most vulnerable groups. CAA ratings from green to red will indicate levels of improvement and performance. The assessment considers various evidence sources and is a joint effort of inspectorates to provide transparent public reporting on local service delivery.
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CAAs and LEAs
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- 4. How is CAA working?
Editor's Notes
- The introduction of Comprehensive Area Assessment – CAA – is a landmark in the development of independent assessment of public services. Irrespective of where you live or who you work for in local public services, CAA is relevant to you. From the councillor keen to know how well constituents are being served by their public services; the chief executive who wants to understand how effectively local priorities are being tackled – and who is doing better; to the man or woman on the street, curious about how their public services are delivering. All of these individuals will find the information they need through CAA.
- CAA is a radical departure from the past: 1. Its key focus is on the outcomes being achieved by local public services for their communities. CAA looks at results rather than examining structures and processes. We want to know whether services are making a difference; and are they helping improve people’s lives? 2. It doesn’t limit its focus to one organisation, but instead looks at how successfully local public services are working together to achieve improvements for local people 3. It isn’t top-down, but places the issues that residents say matter to them at the centre of the assessment process. 4. CAA will ensure that public services undergo robust and proportionate assessment. It has been designed to reduce the administrative burden on councils and other bodies, by relying more on existing national and local data. There won’t be a rolling programme of regular inspection, but inspection will continue for services for children in care or in vulnerable circumstances. 5. We will report the results of CAA in language that the public will understand through a dedicated website which will be launched at the end of year at www.oneplace.directgov.uk We mustn’t underestimate the challenge this poses to us all: inspectors and public services alike. It requires a major cultural shift – new ways of working together for inspectorates, and a whole new approach to assessment by local services.
- Assessments up until now, such as CPA in councils, have promoted the delivery of better services, better value for money, and an increased accountability for the use of public money. So why the need for CAA? If local services are to respond to the priorities of local communities, public services need to work together. The introduction of Local Area Agreements and Sustainable Community Strategies reflects the fact that different areas face different challenges, and that these can only be tackled by public services working together. In this environment assessment has to follow suit. And joined-up delivery requires joined-up working across all of the local inspectorates: the Audit Commission, the Care Quality Commission, the inspectorates of constabulary, prisons and probation, and Ofsted. In this joined-up environment we can no longer focus on individual organisations or on processes. We need to assess the outcomes achieved collectively for local communities. And, rightly, we need to ensure that we are assessing what matters most to local people, not just national priorities. Increasingly local services are being given the freedom to deliver more responsive and personalised services - services that are built around the needs of individuals, families and communities, not around institutional boundaries. CAA has been developed to reflect these changes. But underpinning all of this is the need to continue the drive for improvement in our public services, along with providing public assurance that public bodies are providing value for money, especially in the current climate.
- This diagram sets out the two main elements of CAA and how they are interrelated and supported by a common pool of evidence. The central element is the area assessment which feeds into, and is fed by, the organisational assessments that local public services undergo. In the area assessment the inspectorates judge together how well local public services are meeting the priorities that have been set locally and in particular how likely they are to improve in the future. The organisational assessments for councils, combines the external auditor’s assessment of value for money in the use of resources with an assessment of how well they manage performance. The organisational assessment for other main public bodies in each area reflects the frameworks for NHS organisations, police authorities and forces, and fire and rescue authorities. Each includes the external auditor’s assessment of value for money. It will be the first time we have consistent value for money judgments across sectors. Both the area assessment and organisational assessment are informed by the data that is available in the new National Indicator Set, the information produced by councils and other local organisations to monitor their own performance and the views of service users and local people. This interrelated approach aims to help minimise the work local services need to do to respond to the assessment. I’ll explain a little more about each element of the assessment in turn.
- The unique element of CAA is the area assessment. For the first time, the inspectorates are pooling their information and understanding to look at outcomes in each area, regardless of organisational boundaries and responsibilities. We are using this broad approach to assess the future prospects in an area for achieving better outcomes, by examining the impact that local service organisations are collectively having on improving priority outcomes. The assessment looks forward, using the available evidence – at what the prospects for improvement will be. This is achieved by answering three questions, with the first two leading to the third, and most relevant, judgement: How effectively priorities express the community needs and aspirations: how well local services understand their communities; A judgement on how effectively local services are tackling these community needs; and finally A judgement on the prospects that outcomes will continue to improve Underpinning these questions will be assessments of sustainability, impact on inequality and on those whose circumstances make them vulnerable, and of course value for money. There will be no ‘scored’ judgement or overall classification of area assessments. We will use “green flags” to reflect exceptional performance or outstanding improvement, resulting in sustainably better outcomes, and from which others can learn. We will use “red flags” where we have significant concerns about outcomes and future prospects, where more needs to be done.
- As local bodies are assessed by different inspectorates, reflecting the context and organisation of each service sector, this will continue to be true under CAA. The form of organisational assessments therefore varies and these are set out in the relevant performance frameworks for each sector: Ofsted with children and young people’s services; CQC with health. Both have recently published their plans for how they will assess their specific areas alongside CAA; joined-up assessment is becoming much more of a reality under CAA. Each organisational assessment feeds into the area assessment and will take into account a Value for Money assessment. In addition, each inspectorate is focusing on how effectively the local body is contributing to the shared priorities for the area.
- A central objective of the new assessment system is to minimise any additional administration on assessed bodies. Throughout the development of the framework a key principle has been to use locally produced data sources to assess performance, and to use the COUNT principle (collect once, use numerous times) across the inspectorates involved in CAA. We are using the 188 national indicators in the new National Indicator Set, where this information is available. We are also using information from a variety of other sources. Audit and inspection evidence, information from government offices and other partners, and feedback from service users, the local community and those in the voluntary and business sectors. This information is being assessed over the summer by the local inspectors, coordinated by the CAA lead at the Audit Commission.
- A key objective is to report the results of CAA to the public. We will report annually, using a dedicated new oneplace website. This aims to be the ‘one place’ where local people can visit to find out about their local public services, and how these match up to other areas. We will also report in appropriate ways to other audiences such as ministers and government. While the website will be the main reporting mechanism, we will be working with local services themselves as well as national voluntary groups to ensure that the results of our assessments are accessible to as many local people as possible – including those who do not have access to the internet. The reporting process also means that the website will enable those with a more professional interest in the results to find out greater detail about the assessments, and to identify good practice across England. With local partnerships, however, we will make sure that there are no surprises – and will be reporting regularly to LSPs on our emerging findings, and on those areas where we have concerns (and may eventually place red flags) But CAA will evolve over time. In future years there will be more information that we can use, and a greater interactivity to offer both the public and those involved in delivering public services.