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We live in a world where everybody expects a service to deliver on its promises and in the words of the Ronseal advert "do what it says on the tin". The performance assessment framework (PAF) has provided the means to judge social services and to set targets for improvements. But PAF is still relatively new to social services departments so it is hardly surprising there have been teething problems.

The Audit Commission uses the phrase "the golden thread" to describe the flow of understanding in public sector organisations if planned improvements are to become a living reality. I have heard this renamed the "golden threat". One social worker friend tells me that when her director spies a dodgy indicator he tells the assistant director to "get that PI up!" The assistant director tells the principal officer "get that PI up" and so on. The social workers at the end of the golden threat wonders how they can do this all on their own.


This approach to performance improvement is based on the premise that all processes and procedures are in place to improve things if only staff would get on with it. But performance management disciplines are still new to social services so staff are not always in tune with them. IT systems are completely unforgiving if not used properly, staff may not have been fully trained about what PIs mean, how they link with other priorities, how performance is recorded and what their part in that is. Besides, front-line staff have more pressing priorities, don't they?

The result of this has often been that performance against some PIs is only saved from disaster by panic activity at the last minute. And the "performance culture" that senior managers want to develop is sometimes experienced at the front line as more top-down pressure, and derided as unpredictable bureaucratic folly unrelated to practice.

In Lancashire we have struggled with this as much as other local authorities and have recently established a set of six performance principles and a way of incorporating performance management down the line as part of the planning cycle.

First of all it is axiomatic that the organisational arrangements we make to collect information about performance should not affect service users. There is an expectation that in children and families work initial assessments should be done in seven days, which many feel is too tight. In some local authorities, in order to meet this deadline, managers have cut corners, delayed taking referrals or pretended the work has finished when it hasn't.

Treating the people we are serving as pawns of the PI is appalling and pointless. Nothing changes in this attempt to appease the PIand nothing is done to challenge an unacceptable deadline. The Audit Commission refers to this concentration on a single PI to the exclusion of good practice and decent outcomes as "gaming" and that is exactly what it is, playing with people's lives.

Second, front-line staff must be able to see the relationship between measured performance, good practice and good outcomes for service users. Senior managers must make sure that all staff can reconcile these three.

Data collected for case recording must be used for performance measurement. There should be no double entry of data to different systems. Front-line staff have responsibility for the quality of data used for performance management and must understand their responsibilities.

Plans for improvement must be understood up and down the line. PIs and targets must be acted upon at team level, which means that business plans must operate at team level. Information must be made available to teams to ensure they can manage their local performance responsibilities.

In any organisation people respond when they are given a say in what they do and responsibility for outcomes. So we are working on the idea of the tree of knowledge. The roots of expectation from the public, members and the government combine in the trunk of organisational priorities that in turn split into branches of detailed action plans, which include individual PIs, and the twigs and leaves of the day-to-day action of each member of staff. The key is that staff only have to know their own twig and leaf - not the whole trunk.


We are in the process of breaking down all the PIs into groups relevant to each type of team or unit. This means that each team in future will have six or eight prime PIs to look after. That team will be directly responsible for performance against that selection of prime PIs. Each team manager is to be briefed on what is expected of them and information will be made available about progress against the PI on a team basis quarterly. In team planning each of the prime PIs must be considered for improvement. This way the management of performance will be in the team's hands and there can be no surprises from above half way through the year.

Some teams will have a considerable number of prime PIs and some teams none, so we have decided to identify measures of success across the board - outcome measures for all teams. We are asking all teams what activity they believe they should be measured against so that local PIs can be devised.

The parameters being used are the Social Services Inspectorate standards, corporate objectives and the social services department's priorities, the team's own view of what is good practice and their view of what good outcomes are for service users. This cannot be properly done without the involvement of service users to act as the roots that nourish the twigs in a truly bottom-up process.

This might sound bizarre (who wants more PIs?), but this exercise will put the national PIs into a broader context for staff and help them incorporate national expectations into their view of what is truly important. Teams with no national PIs have already come forward with ideas for how their success can be measured. But another early result has been telling. Some teams have had difficulty identifying feasible outcome measures and have been forced to accept that the national PIs have some merit.

This approach is designed to involve front-line staff, but will it work? A planning cycle and performance management process that incorporates front-line concerns as well as government expectations must have a better chance than something that feels imposed from the top. After all, performance management and targets are only organisational processes that are trying to make things better for vulnerable people - a purpose at the very heart of the social care tradition.

Current criticism of the PAF is about the unintended consequences of its implementation, its association with new working practices and incomplete understanding of the process. I have yet to hear a cogent case made against the notion of recording progress against a clear measure of success and trying to improve on it. Telling staff why the organisation is doing something, inviting them to take part and resourcing them to do it can only be a winner. 

David Burnham is head of information services at Lancashire social services; tel 01772 534408; or e-mail David.Burnham@ssd.lancscc.gov.uk