The needs analysis stage provides the foundation for any commissioning strategy and provides an over-arching role to ensure the required range and capacity of services available and accessible to children, young people and their families, in order to achieve the five outcomes in the Every Child Matters programme. Data provides a starting point for needs analysis and frequently raises more questions than providing responses.
1. It is important to get the real picture on the ground:
- use the views of children, young people and their families to focus on outcomes
- ask children, young people and families about their needs so that this drives the thinking
- use the views of ‘experts’ within all services including the voluntary sector to help planners and commissioners understand trends and causal relationships
- track the ongoing experience of children and young people, for example using care pathways, to compare the reality with their assessed need.
- ensure that locally developed services are locally owned
- help increase service take-up (eg by vulnerable families who are not accessing services)
- improve the quality of data
- ensure that costly mistakes are avoided, build participation networks upon existing good practice
- at an increasing number of decision points
- at different stages of joint planning and commissioning; eg needs assessment, writing the CYPP, service design, tendering and monitoring services
- Children’s Trusts can produce a plan for CYP engagement and employ participation and advocacy skills.
- in order to ensure the confidence of local people in the information gathered and in its use. This is a standard local authority function.
5. The community, parents, children and young people themselves should help inform what data are collected and how.
Ensure that the needs analysis
- looks at overall needs of the client group, not just existing service users.
- considers future population and prevalence of need, to take account of likely trends and future changes in demand.
- complements census and prevalence information with information about the sub-population which actually uses services.
- ensures patterns of demand are compared over time to consider trends, and benchmarked to look for differences between geographical areas.
- ensures statistical data is complemented by more qualitative information about needs from users.
