National parenting strategy: making a positive difference to children and young people through parenting

Section 9: Measuring our progress

With an end goal as important as ours – better support for parents and improved outcomes for children and young people – it's vital that we have the measures in place to ensure we are making good progress at each and every stage.

With this in mind work is already underway by NHS Health Scotland to develop a model that will identify the key outcomes that collectively we need to achieve for parents and families in order that we deliver on our goal of improved outcomes for all children and young people.

Based on the feedback from parents and practitioners, and informed by the evidence reviews, this outcomes model will:

• Provide us with a clearer understanding of the short, medium, long-term and national outcomes that we can expect from better supporting parents in Scotland and earlier interventions
• Help partners to fully understand the relationship between services and support for parents and families and the outcomes they wish to achieve
• Enable partners to plan future services and programmes that build the links between parenting and the wider outcomes on wellbeing, inequalities and resilient individuals and communities
• Encourage partners to refocus their services to achieve joint outcomes more efficiently and effectively
• Support partners by informing plans for monitoring and evaluating impact on shared outcomes at a national and local level.

The same outcomes model will also identify a range of illustrative activities that, according to the evidence, will help lead to the outcomes we want to achieve for parents – namely, ensuring they have the information, capacity, skills and confidence they need.

Measurement framework

We will also develop a measurement framework by tasking a parenting Data Working Group to review the available indicator sets and determine the most appropriate 'core' national and local indicator set for measuring medium to long-term outcomes for parents, families, children and young people as set out in our outcomes model.

It will be important that this group maintain consistency with existing indicator sets such as those used to measure progress against the Early Years Framework or new indicators to be developed as part of the Early Years Collaborative and coherent with those for GIRFEC . That said, the group will also be asked to consider whether we need to develop any additional indicators – for example, the measurement of parental confidence or the wellbeing of parents, including fathers.

Using the results of both the outcomes model and the measurement framework, we will measure our progress, adjusting our actions wherever necessary so that we can be confident we are making a positive difference through parenting.