The Outcomes Framework is a key foundation of our new Strategy 2024 - 2027. It represents a really exciting step forward in how we will measure, describe, and communicate the positive difference we make for children and young people across the UK.
What is the Outcomes Framework and why do we need it?
Our Outcomes Framework will allow us to better measure and describe the impact we make for children and young people across the charity.
At the moment, we understand a lot about the positive difference we make in individual services and contracts, but we don’t have a way to do this across different services and parts of the country.
Understanding our impact is absolutely crucial to our new Strategy. It will help us to make sure we are striving for excellent and inclusive services; it will transform our ability to influence at every level; and it will improve our accountability.
Funders, decision-makers, the public, and crucially children, young people, and families, need to understand the positive difference we're making as a charity. Without this, we can't explain why they should trust us and support us over and above anyone else.
The goal is to get to a point where we can understand and articulate our impact, so we can demonstrate how we are delivering on our Purpose: Changing Childhoods. Changing Lives. – and how we are working with children and young people to be safer, happier, healthier, and more hopeful.
Over the three years of the Strategy, our Outcomes Framework will demonstrate the difference we make for children, young people and families we support directly, for those who benefit from longer-term change to policy and systems, and also for our wider society – whether that’s adding value to a local community, or achieving cost-savings for the Treasury.
Our Outcomes Framework will measure our impact across four key domains (areas of measurement), linked directly with our Strategy. It will set out how we help children and young people to be:
- Safer
- Happier
- Healthier
- More hopeful
What does this mean for colleagues?
Initially, we are focusing on better understanding and using the outcomes data we already collect. This means there will be no immediate changes for colleagues in Children's Services, and colleagues will not be expected to do anything different or duplicate their reporting. We will, however, continue working with colleagues to improve data quality, as having good data is crucial to developing and implementing a meaningful outcomes framework.
As we move into years two and three of the Strategy, we will start reaching out to more colleagues about further changes we can make around reporting and will be developing our dashboard. See the timeline below for more information.
Timeline
More information
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Get to know the terminology around the Framework and read our glossary: Outcomes Framework - Glossary