The Opportunities and Challenges of the Changing Public Services Landscape for the Third Sector in Scotland: A Longitudinal Study: Year Two Report

APPENDIX A: AIMS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE RESEARCH

The aim of the work is to track the opportunities and challenges that third sector organisations are facing with a changing public services landscape in Scotland between 2009 and 2014.

The objectives are to:

• Measure the extent to which third sector organisations perceive the Concordat (and other policies such as Scrutiny Improvement, changes to budgets and, in time, BV2) have impacted upon their organisation and contributed to business decisions around business planning, workload and emphasis, organisational structure, staffing, behavioural changes within the organisation etc.
• Determine the extent to which third sector organisations feel they have an outcome focus and whether this is aligned to the National Performance Framework and how this changes over time.
• Identify the ways in which third sector organisations are building collaborations across the sector and with local and central government and other service providers and funders.
• Assess the level of involvement of third sector organisations in CPPs and the extent to which they feel they are engaged in decision making and how this changes over time.
• Understand the ways in which local finance and funding decisions by public sector partners and funding/resources generated by third sector organisations themselves are impacting upon third sector organisations over time and whether they are contributing to offering good value for money.
• Assess the extent to which third sector organisation feel they are delivering high quality, efficient and responsive public services and how this has changed over time.
• Determine whether changes to the scrutiny landscape have been realised by third sector organisations and track this over time.
• Identify any other perceived challenges of the changing public services landscape on third sector organisations over time.
• Identify good practices from across the third sector where organisations are making the most of opportunities provided by the changing public services landscape.
• Make any recommendations for improvement to ensure third sector organisations deliver high quality public services that are continually improving, efficient and responsive to local people's needs.