Children’s Centres

Perspective Children's Centre

Driving Service Improvement in Children’s Centres

Perspective Process
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Perspective promotes and maintains continuous interaction between self review and improvement planning giving Children’s Centre managers, locality managers or cluster leaders access to information about the status of evaluations and plans throughout their Centres. Leaders can identify issues quickly and easily, and make sure that plans are focussed on key priorities, real improvement and impact, a key part of an inspection or an annual review.

Perspective provides a secure store for all the evidence related to a Centre or locality inspection, plus the facility to gather the views of stakeholders from within and external to the centres. This leads to robust and shared understanding of strengths, areas targeted for improvement, and collaborative involvement in the process; essential parts of an Ofsted inspection or internal review.

Centre and locality priorities can be created and tracked in Perspective; senior leaders can view progress of plans and evaluate when necessary. Centre leaders can also ensure Centre priorities are being tackled by disseminating targets across their staff. Perspective also provides leaders with a consistent scaffold to support them through the process of self evaluation and target setting by providing challenging questions, expert guidance, evidence sources and benchmarking statements.

Perspective facilitates the monitoring of services, ensuring consistency throughout, so that leaders can identify weaknesses, provide support, or recognise consistent themes or needs across multiple strands.

‘As a busy manager, managing multiple priorities, Perspective provides an efficient and effective way to manage key performance of the Centres – namely self evaluation and preparation for Ofsted, development planning and service user feedback. It’s all online, secure and all data, evidence and documents are in one place via the internet. Excellent!’

Emma Maynard, Children’s Centre Co-Ordinator, Ladybirds, Oak Tree and Willows Children’s Centres, Essex

Click on any of the modules below to see more information about how Perspective handles that process and supports leaders and managers:

What does a Perspective Children’s Centre have?

  • A convenient, collaborative and consistent way for Centre and locality leaders to evaluate performance effectively
  • Identification of key priorities that have the greatest potential to impact on performance
  • A source of expert advice to support and promote rigorous and rigorous self review
  • A Centre-wide, structured approach to planning that makes sure that priorities are at the heart of improvement/business plans
  • Improvement/business plans that continuously provide an accurate, up to date, picture of progress throughout a Centre
  • A clear and demonstrable relationship between self evaluation and improvement planning, essential for Ofsted
  • Action plans that ensure every individual is always clear about their role and responsibilities within improvement/business plans
  • A simple, quick, efficient way of distributing, collecting and analysing parental surveys and evidencing self review
  • National, regional, and local data about Centre performance and context to inform the review and planning processes
  • CPD and personal target monitoring across the whole Centre or locality

‘Sure Start County Durham have been using Perspective since December 2009 to support the Self Evaluation and planning processes for 43 Children’s Centres located throughout the County. Since purchasing the software we have found that costs are competitive, there is excellent company support through both their extremely responsive customer helpdesk and dedicated consultant time. Training packages that we have utilised have been bespoke, delivered by knowledgeable consultants and well received by Cluster Managers.

Our overall findings are that the Perspective is a very simple to use but powerful reporting tool which, given the changes that have already been made to the Self Evaluation Framework, responsive to meet service needs, flexible and adaptable to the needs of individual users and most importantly produces the documentation required for the Ofsted inspection regime as efficiently as possible.’

Stephen Burton, Principal Information Officer, Sure Start County Durham

What are the Key Features in Perspective for Children’s Centres?

  • For Centre Leaders…
  • Collaborative Self Evaluation
  • Focussed Development Planning
  • Preparation for Inspection
  • Secure Evidence Storage
  • Distributed/Cascaded Leadership
  • Monitoring across Whole Centre
  • For Centre Staff…
  • Structured Planning Framework
  • Individual Action Plans
  • Scaffold supporting Self Evaluation
  • Preparation for Reviews
  • Professional Development
  • Quality Assurance
  • For the Whole Centre…
  • Clear Identification of Priorities
  • Clear Focus on Improvement
  • Stakeholder Engagement
  • Bespoke User Structure
  • Data Driven Decision Making
  • Centre and Locality Overview

Would you like to know more?

If you would, then talk to us. We think that Perspective has a role to play in any Children’s Centre achieving or maintaining its outstanding status, as well as supporting its internal processes, whether they be planning, monitoring or service development. Therefore we would like to talk to you about how we could tailor Perspective to the needs of your Centre or locality.

Our team of specialists want to discuss your particular requirements, explain more about our software, share our experience of working with senior leaders up and down the country, and then demonstrate how we work in partnership with Children’s Centres to create an implementation and training plan that drives out the goals you want to achieve.

To arrange a phone conversation in the first instance or a 30 minute online demonstration, please contact us using the details below: