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A target often proves a mixed blessing. The row about the effect of hospital accident and emergency waiting time targets on planned operations has been followed closely in the press, and the annual publication of school league tables is always the subject of public criticism. Partly as a result of this criticism, fewer targets are now promised for hospitals and schools.

Despite this negative publicity, the Audit Commission report, Targets in the Public Sector, strikes a confident note about the future of performance management. But not much is heard about social services performance targets. Few deal with life and death, or concern matters the general population knows much about - hence the lower profile. Within most social services departments, however, debate is sharp.

The Department of Health (DoH) performance assessment framework requires each social services department to report annually on its performance against 51 performance indicators (PIs) and set targets for the following year. These PIs are taken into account in the annual star-rating exercise.

The framework, which has been in operation since 1998, has played a huge part in changing front-line work conditions and the way priorities are set in social services departments. Most PIs are agreed to be reasonable measures of success, although in the main they measure organisational inputs rather than outcomes for service users. Expecting social services departments to report on the number of service users being sent a care plan, the number of carers' assessments done or the number of children looked after having a dental check is clearly reasonable. Many departments have invested heavily in systems and processes to collect and manage these data, and are the better for it.

But, as with other professional public sector activity, criticisms remain. Those from operational staff centre on three themes.

First, some PIs are perceived as perverse. For instance, improvements sometimes have poor consequences for other operational imperatives. One is the PI for the number of looked-after children who have three or more placement changes a year - the national target being 16 per cent at the highest. But social services departments are exhorted to set the number of looked-after children on their books at a particular level. Departments starting from a high base are moving their settled, stable children off statutory orders. But the result is that the proportion of children who are less settled, and have more than two placement changes a year, is bound to rise. This PI is a "key threshold" - against which performance must reach a certain standard before a higher star rating can be allocated. But achieving a reasonable number of looked-after children is a strategic priority. What is a director to do?

Second, the profile of PIs is sometimes said to skew managerial effort away from planned developments into activity to improve performance against isolated PIs. Further, the efforts can be out of all proportion to the real importance of the activity measured. In my authority, we faced particular issues last year with two PIs, one about care leavers and one about care plans for adult service users. Pushing both of these up the scale was regarded as equal priority, and work was done on both. One affected 112 service users, the other 37,500.

Both these criticisms have some force, but they are merely background noises compared with the key issue. For most PIs relate unequivocally to important measures and most are not perverse. The examples of dodgy detail above are used to attack performance management because of the primary criticism that underlies all others - that front-line workers commonly experience performance management as an imposition from above, as government bureaucracy that has nothing to do with real improvements for real people.

Social services departments also face more subtle challenges.

A key issue is the timing of the framework's introduction. This coincided with the raised expectations of recording laid down by the DoH guidance, Recording with Care. It is compounded in social services departments that have introduced service user databases where social workers enter data directly into assessment and care plan applications.

Each local authority is charged with developing an electronic social care record within the year. An integrated children's system is being piloted now and the green paper, Every Child Matters, envisages sophisticated data exchange systems, implying further direct use of IT. So front-line staff and first-line managers have responsibility for data entry and the quality of data on a scale that was unimagined even five years ago. "I didn't come into this job to be a typist" is the response of many. Indeed for many their job has changed beyond recognition.


A further subtle problem is that, because of the speed of these changes, senior and middle managers no longer have any personal experience of the day-to-day working pattern of their front-line staff.

All this adds up to a degree of front-line scepticism, which is the key challenge to incorporation of performance management disciplines.

Then there are the unhelpful definitions - most of which operational staff will be unaware of. The most spectacular is the residential care loophole. Helping frail, elderly people to stay in their own homes is better for them than placing them in residential care, so the DoH expects admissions to be low and falling. But people admitted to long-term residential care immediately after a short-term stay are not counted as long-term admissions for the relevant PI. The serpent's apple in the garden of Eden can hardly have been more tempting than this piece of bureaucratic magic to social services departments with high residential placement rates. We must be thankful this loophole has now been closed.

Finally, the framework is heavily weighted towards the quality of life of looked-after children, and assessment and care planning for older people. So staff in these teams can hardly move for PIs, whereas staff in family centres, residential units and so on are not directly affected.

Despite these problems, the framework represents a chance for social services departments to identify what's important, plan for improvement, compare themselves with others and pull together high-level aspirations with the day-to-day work of staff. As the first five years of the framework come to an end, the DoH has started a fundamental review of the system. The key to this review's success is to engage front-line staff in managing performance far more comprehensively than has so far been possible.

Tips for the DOH

• Don't tear up the script and start again. People are getting used to this set of PIs, and social services departments have made huge efforts to collect this information. Most PIs make sense and fit easily within business plans.
• Using the current output measures as a basis, build upon them with PIs that measure outcomes for service users. This process requires face-to-face feedback or surveys, so might be expensive. This is the challenge. Confront it.
• PIs should be meaningfully clustered. Front-line staff do not need to know all the PIs, but they do need intimate knowledge of the half-dozen on which their activity and recording have an impact.
• PIs should be understandable. To achieve general understanding, the definition of each PI should be subject to the one-minute rule - can a front-line worker understand what a PI means and how it is to be measured after hearing it explained in less than a minute?
• Count positives, so staff are conscious of measuring successes rather than avoiding failures. So, instead of re-registrations on the child protection register, count successful discharges. And make sure "very good" performance equates to 100 per cent of whatever activity is being counted, rather than zero - or worse, somewhere in between.