Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA)

Preparing for Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA)

The Audit Commission, working with the other six key public service inspectorates, has now published the new CAA framework. It will go live in April 2009 with the first reports expected to be published in November 2009.

Preparing for Comprehensive Area Assessment
CAA Framework Document 10th February 2008

CAA looks at how well local services are working together to improve the quality of life for local people. It will make independent information available to people about the quality and performance of their local services. The Audit Commission hope that it will help citizens and communities make informed choices and influence decisions and stress that :

- It is about people and places.
- It will give people a snapshot of life in their local area each year.
- It will help local services improve quality of life in their area.
- It will help people understand if they are getting value for money from their local services.

CAA will provide a joint assessment of outcomes for people in every part of the country and a forward look at prospects for sustainable improvement.

For the first time, local public services will be held collectively to account for their impact on the wellbeing of people in all communities. This means that CAA will look across councils, health bodies, police forces, fire and rescue services and others responsible for local public services - which are increasingly expected to work in partnership to tackle the challenges facing their communities.

In CAA, the inspectorates will make maximum use of the performance management information that local public services already use to self-assess and manage those services.

To help local authorities and their partners prepare for CAA, a huge number of toolkits guides and techniques have been devised by key national bodies across the public sector. The East Midlands Improvement and Efficiency Partnership will continuously review what is available and "kite mark" or "quality assure" the best available.

An introduction to some of these toolkits appears below, and will be added to as more are produced. All are available to download directly from this site.

Locality Self Evaluation
Guidance for Partnerships - IDeA (published in Jan 2009)

Children's Services
"Are we there yet?" - Self-assessment tool for children's trust boards
Published by the Audit Commission

Assessing Children's Services and Adult Learning
Guidance published by Ofsted outlining how they will contribute to the joint inspectorate Comprehensive Area Assessment from 1st April 2009,

Health and Social Care
The new Care Quality Commission is currently consulting on their approach to assessment and reviews for 2009/10

Planning
A Benchmark for the Spatial Planning Function
Published by the Planning Advisory Service

Culture and Sport
"A Passion for Excellence" - An Improvement Strategy for Culture and Sport
Published by the LGA and partners

Locality Self Evaluation - Guidance for Local Strategic Partnerships

This guidance has been developed for partnerships to assist in developing their own locality self evaluation. This will help you agree an assessment of your own performance and to identify where focused attention and improvement is needed to achieve local priorities. It is based on two phases of trialling and learning from the experience of fourteen local strategic partnerships, each of which undertook a locality self evaluation for their area. It has also been developed in consultation with the joint inspectorates.

Locality Self Evaluation Idea [download PDF document]

Improving children's trust governance

Children's trusts are unincorporated associations of the key agencies involved in delivering public services to children and young people in an area.

Children's trusts do not own assets, or employ staff. Although they are not legally accountable bodies for spending public money, they do advise and influence local action. Decisions made, and principles agreed, by children's trusts influence the deployment of staff and other resources, including the use of assets in an area.
Children's trusts need to consider the governance arrangements that will ensure the best use is made of public resources for the benefit of children and young people.

The Audit Commission have adapted the principles set out in the "Good governance standard for public services" for children's trusts, recognising their unincorporated status, to produce a self-assessment tool for children's trust boards.

Are We There Yet 29th October 2008 Tool [download PDF document]

Comprehensive Area Assessment: assessing children's services and adult learning

Ofsted will use the outcomes from inspection and regulation of services for children and young people to contribute to the joint inspectorate Comprehensive Area Assessment.

Ofsted's annual performance rating of councils' children's services will make a significant contribution to the ‘managing performance' theme of the organisational assessment and, therefore, to the overall judgement. This will draw significantly on the outcomes of Ofsted's inspection and regulation of care and learning services for children and young people. It will be reported in the CAA organisational assessment of councils and, by letter, to Directors of Children's Services at the same time.

OFSTED CAA [download PDF document]

The Care Quality Commission

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is being established to regulate the quality of health and adult social care and look after the interests of people detained under the Mental Health Act.

From 1 April 2009, CQC will bring together the work of the Commission for Social Care Inspection, the Healthcare Commission and the Mental Health Act Commission, creating for the first time a single independent regulator of health, mental health and adult social care in England.

CQC will communicate openly about their proposed approach to reviews of health and adult social care organisations in 2009/10.

They recognise that it will be a transitional year, before the full registration system comes into force in April 2010. The first Comprehensive Area Assessment will also be published in late 2009. As a result, they propose a progressive approach to 2009/10.

In their consultation document, they invite views on the principles and broad approach to periodic reviews, special reviews and studies in 2009/10, and introduce their dimensions for assessing quality. The consultation period runs until Thursday 12th March 2009.

CQC Consultation [download PDF document]

Planning service benchmark

The new spatial planning benchmark is now available.
It is a tool that helps local authorities improve their planning services. They can do this either alone or through a process of Peer Review. The new benchmark relates to the new comprehensive area assessment (CAA) and replaces the previous CPA benchmark.

Using the spatial planning benchmark, a council will be able to identify priority actions and areas of support required to improve the delivery of a planning function.

Planning Benchmark [download PDF document]

Planning Advisory Service

The Planning Advisory Service (PAS) aims to facilitate self-sustaining change and improvement in the planning sector. PAS helps councils provide faster, fairer, more efficient and better quality services. If you are interested in receiving a Peer Review of your spatial planning function please contact PAS at pas@idea.gov.uk.

An Improvement Strategy for Culture and Sport

‘A Passion for Excellence' is published by the Local Government Association (LGA) and produced jointly with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Sport England, Arts Council England, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, English Heritage, the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) and other partners.

This strategy document is concerned with supporting local government, as community leaders, to improve the delivery of culture and sport services to the local community.

It sets a framework for improvement in the culture and sport sector and includes mechanisms and tools to support self-improvement. It also clarifies the respective roles and responsibilities in delivering the strategy of all the major stakeholders in the culture and sport sector, in line with the National Performance Framework and the National Improvement and Efficiency Strategy.

Culture Passion for Excellence [download PDF document]