Author: Donna

CAMHS National Summit 2022: The power of listening

Posted on by Donna
Headshot image of Karen Bodger

Karen Bodger, our new Implementation Lead for the North West region, reflects on the presentations at the CAMHS 2022 National Summit: Transforming Mental Health Services for Adults and children and shares some of the speakers’ insights.

Speakers noted the UK is in the grip of a mental health crisis, with children and young people suffering in particular. Referrals to NHS Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) have increased by 180% during the last five years, creating significant pressure on services and raising the threshold for support and treatment. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) model is routinely used to tot up all the trauma children have experienced, creating feelings of bleakness for support workers. Still, the CAMHS summit were determined we have hope and talked a lot about harnessing the power of listening to help support.

Speakers acknowledged it’s grim out there for young people who are suffering. As Dr Harriet Stewart said, “young people’s mental health was worsening at an alarming rate before the pandemic. In the aftermath of Covid, children present at CAMHS with more complex needs. Staff are exhausted, burnt out, and leaving the service”. When Dr Stewart said, quite bluntly, “if we don’t get it right, we’ll ruin their lives, their opportunities,” it was hard not to feel like we are, as a society, failing our young people. But as she said, “we need to think we can do this.”

I also heard from young people like Katie Hickson, who spoke up about her experiences. She is a young woman who gets involved in conversations with the government and campaigns, making me feel hugely hopeful. Katie so eloquently reminded us, “young people already have a voice; they don’t need to be given it. It’s the job of the professionals, the service providers, and parents to listen to their voice and provide opportunities for them to be heard”.  

I also loved hearing Max Davie (who very impressively managed to squeeze in a reference to CBeebies’ Octonauts while debunking some of the myths around early help) talk about listening to the difficulties young people were experiencing as we’ve become a bit fixated on labels, but Max demonstrated the importance of listening first and diagnosing later.

Nicola Harvey, the author of Mindful Little Yogis, shows us how active listening can help young people feel psychologically safe and that without providing that psychological safety, we can’t expect young people to grow up resilient. Reiterating without listening first, we can’t expect better outcomes.

There was a lot of agreement around the need to fund early support hubs, that young people can access without needing a referral.

How can the Outcomes Star help your service?

The Outcomes Stars are listening and conversational tools helping services transform lives. They are keywork tools and measurement tools.  If your organisation provides early intervention mental health support for young people, My Mind Star has seven key outcome areas designed to open up conversations between support workers and the young person about their life. My Mind Star doesn’t assess how severe a mental ‘problem’ is. It explores where the young person is now and where they would like to get to in the future. It is a holistic co-production tool involving listening and discussing a young person’s life, situation, priorities, hopes and aspirations. Together the worker and young person co-create goals and action plans. Using the scales to measure the distance a young person travels through the journey of change over a period of time. Star data also helps managers assess workers caseloads to help reduce burnout. Star data also provides service improvement insight to analyse if the support provided is working, individual progression data and aggregated service level data to report impact to funders.

What I personally like about the Outcomes Star approach is that it starts with listening and, when used well, puts young people at the centre of their journey. Rather than defining a young person by statistics, by how many ACEs they’ve experienced, or whether they are ‘unwell enough to warrant service or support, the Outcomes Star is a collaborative tool that supports and measures change. 

Learn more about My Mind Star

Welcome back to conference season! Autumn 2022

Posted on by Donna

Events & Exhibitions

Autumn has arrived! After a notable absence in these past few years due to the pandemic, we are delighted the industry conferences are awakening again. We are exhibiting at three key exhibitions in the latter part of 2022 and attending several more.  Scroll to the bottom to learn more. 

At the time of writing, our first significant exhibition is with the Carers Trust Partners Network Conference: Reconnecting – Nationally and Locally taking place on the 21-22nd Sept in Nottingham. It’s the first big event in the carers calendar since 2019. We are looking forward to meeting old and new faces, promoting the Stars, the Star Online and the Star materials, as well as hearing about the radical changes in the unpaid carers landscape from the experts. We’ve also worked alongside Carers Trust to explore what could be learnt from Star data across several Carers Trust network partners and created a new Exploring Carers Star Data case study to inspire services supporting carers. Also available on the Carers Star webpage.

The next major event in our calendar is billed as the leading health & social care conference in Northern Ireland, taking place in Belfast on 19-20th October. The Northern Ireland Annual Conference & Exhibition 2022 (NICON22). This is Ireland’s first large conference for the Health & Social care sector since 2019. It will also be our first big exhibition for our new(ish) Scottish and Irish Outcomes Star teams to showcase our growing suite of almost 50 Stars. We’ll be promoting the value of the Outcomes Stars and highlighting the essential insight your service can gain from Star data, to support the people you serve, your workers and your service. We also will be exhibiting and networking with our colleagues across the private, voluntary and community sectors, and looking forward to hearing from the vast array of speakers. Read more about the team attending: Patrick Toland (Ireland), Jim Borland (Scotland) and Eileen Cassidy (Scotland & Ireland). Visit us at booth 8. 

The last major exhibition we will be exhibiting at in 2022 will be The National Children’s and Adults Services Conference in Manchester from 2-4th November. The event is aimed at all those working with children, young people, their families and vulnerable adults, including in health, social care and education. We are attending this event to promote the updated Family Star Plus, launching in Spring 2023 following the end of a significant 18-month review process. We will be providing information about the changes to the Family Star Plus, and we are keen to record reactions to the new Star to help us spread the word. For more information, don’t hesitate to get in touch with info@triangleconsulting.co.uk

Lastly, we are also attending the following events. 

  • 8-9th Sept: Go-Lab: Social Outcomes Conference 2022, Oxford – see blog
  • 22nd Sept: CAMHS National Summit 2022: Transforming Mental Health Services for Children & Young Adults, online
  • 3rd Oct: Learning from our practice 2018–2022 with Lloyds Foundation, London
  • 11-12th Oct: COMMUNITY CARE LIVE 2022
  • 21st Oct: #SheMatters Criminal Justice Conference, Kent
  • 11th Nov: Access to Justice, Edinburgh
  • 29th Nov: National Homelessness Event, online
  • 1-2nd Dec: National Commissioning Conference, Derbyshire

Come and talk to our teams who are ready to answer all your questions. Of course, you can always follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn and talk to us there. We are also always on the lookout for the next big success story of Star use and to support connecting services together.  For more information about marketing or your experiences using the Outcomes Stars you can directly contact Jen@Triangleconsulting.co.uk

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Going for collaboration at the GoLab Conference

Posted on by Donna
SOC22_Day_I_Slides_O2GfTGo-1 copy

Triangle co-founder and Outcomes Star co-author Joy MacKeith reflects on the theme of collaboration at this year’s Social Outcomes Conference and points to Human Learning Systems as an effective way to make this the norm in service delivery.

Hear Joy describe what Triangle has learnt about what works in service delivery in this podcast

Watch her conversation with HLS proponent Toby Lowe

In early September, I had a fascinating two days at the Government Outcomes Lab (GoLab) Social Outcomes Conference.

I learnt about Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) and other outcomes-based funding initiatives around the world, from France to Australia and Paraguay to Japan, but for me, the most interesting session was on the UK’s Life Chances Fund.

We heard from many of the initiatives receiving this funding, all of them doing incredible work in a range of sectors including vulnerable mothers, employment and mental health.

The strongest common theme was how this additional funding and its link to long-term outcomes drove meaningful collaboration between providers and commissioners. In these initiatives, all parties are working together to identify blocks and create an ecosystem of services that has the needs of the person being helped at the core. It was inspiring to hear about their work.

Interestingly there wasn’t very much talk about the payment mechanisms and the extent to which linking funding to the achievement of particular targets was a valuable part of the process. From behind-the-scenes conversations I have had at this conference in previous years, I know that this can be a sensitive subject. Projects can be reticent to raise this issue when funders are in the room.

There were, however, some interesting discussions about the sustainability of these programmes. Although they can demonstrate cost savings, these are not always savings to the organisation providing the funding. For example, the local authority provides the funding, but the health service makes the saving. And they are not always ‘cashable’. For example, re-offending rates are reduced, but that does not make it possible to close down a wing of that prison and thereby reduce costs, at least in the short term. This fact can threaten the sustainability of SIBs as the rationale depends on the logic of these cashable savings. Perhaps we need to look for other mechanisms to support collaboration.

I have attended this conference for the last four years. This year I sensed a growing recognition of the importance of a person-centred approach to service delivery and the need to create a collaborative service system to achieve this. And more and more people now have experience of seeing how this can deliver improvements in practice. What we need now is a way of making this way of working part of typical day-to-day practice – in commissioning and service management, rather than something that happens when there is an additional pot of money to incentivise and support it.

Here I think Human Learning Systems (HLS) has some of the answers. It is an approach with problem-solving and ‘doing what it takes’ rather than ‘doing by the book’ at its core. This was a point made at the event by Lee Whitehead of Manchester Metropole University. He studied many SIBs and found that those that followed the HLS principles were more likely to succeed.  Gary Wallace of Plymouth also talked about how they are taking the kind of relational approach that both HLS and Triangle recommend outside of the context of a SIB.

I’ve been exploring HLS and the overlaps with Triangle’s Enabling Help principles with Toby Lowe, one of its leading proponents.  You can watch our conversation here.

And for a fuller description of what Triangle has learnt from twenty years of creating and supporting the Outcomes Stars in practice, listen to this episode of Next Stage Radicals where I describe the main messages of our Enabling Help report.

Also, look out for October’s edition where Mark Smith of Gateshead Council will be talking about how they are transforming their service delivery – informed by HLS and working with the Outcomes StarTM.

I will certainly be back at GoLab in 2023. I hope there will be even more space next year to hear from people like Mark who are finding ways to implement the person-centred and collaborative approaches, that are so important to Triangle and the people who use our Outcomes Stars– with or without a SIB.

Further reading: Dr Anna Good shares her thoughts on #SOC22

Musings on the importance of trusting relationships, professionals’ emotional labour, and the desire to improve delivery through data. 

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GoLab – Social Outcomes Conference 2022

Posted on by Donna

Dr Anna Good shares her thoughts on #SOC22

Last week, Triangle directors- Graham Randles, Joy MacKeith and I attended the Government Outcomes Lab annual conference #SOC22

One presentation that particularly resonated with me was from Reji Ikeda at the Ministry of Justice in Japan. Talking about ‘value measurement for offender rehabilitation’, he emphasised the importance of the quality of the relationship and the ‘emotional labour of professionals and volunteers’ on rehabilitation outcomes. He also spoke about how poor occupational well-being can negatively impact these relationships. I couldn’t resist mentioning the Justice Star as an excellent tool for developing trusting relationships and boosting staff morale in this context.

Joy’s recent report Enabling help puts human relationships at the heart of effective service delivery, so this is at the forefront of my mind when thinking about the Star. The Enabling help report highlights the problems with borrowing from approaches such as the scientific and economic paradigms in social provision. Although not focused on the Star, the innovative suite of Stars offers a better, more enabling approach. I thought of this when the keynote presenter, Julie Battliana, stated that ‘agitation is alone is not enough to make change happen, innovation is required’.

 Another theme that I noticed running throughout the conference was the desire to use data to improve service delivery. I felt this was encouraging in a conference often focused on meeting targets and payment by results. Miika Vuorinen, a Chief of Evaluation from Finland, commented that one way to know if social outcome frameworks are working is to see if they are being integrated into the decision-making processes. Closer to home, Stan Gilmour from Thames Valley Police gave a powerful presentation, emphasising ethical decisions based on using data to allocate resources and plan social impact.

It’s possible I was looking out for these positive signs, as I feel passionate about encouraging and supporting good use of Star data. By ‘good use’ of data, I mean those closest to the creation of Star data (practitioners and managers) interpreting the data and using the learning to encourage changes needed to maximise the outcomes for those being supported.

Further reading: Going for collaboration at the GoLab Conference

Triangle co-founder and Outcomes Star co-author Joy MacKeith reflects on the theme of collaboration at this year’s Social Outcomes Conference and points to Human Learning Systems as an effective way to make this the norm in service delivery.

Sign up to our quarterly newsletter for product updates, case studies, publications and news. 

The Family Star Plus within the Supporting Families Programme (2022-25)

Posted on by Donna

All local authorities delivering Supporting Families must have an approved Outcome Plan setting out their indicators of eligibility with associated family level outcomes against headline objectives set out in the programme guidance.

Since the start of the supporting families programme (formerly called the ‘Troubled families programme’), many local authorities have been using the Family Star Plus as part of evidencing outcomes within their approved Outcomes Plans. This version of the Star was developed specifically to be aligned with the programme’s objectives.

We are currently putting together guidance to show how the Family Star Plus fits the increased list of headline outcomes in the ‘Supporting Families Outcomes Framework 2022-25’, which will be in effect from 3 October 2022:

The new framework identifies ‘practitioner assessments and contacts’ or ‘Practitioner and/or self-assessment’ as valid data sources as part of the evidence within all of the ten headline outcomes, and the Outcomes Star, while collaboratively completed, fits within this category. 

‘Validated outcome measures’ are also suggested as evidence for meeting some outcomes. The validation of the Family Star Plus as an outcomes measure, including evidence of ‘inter-rater reliability’ and ‘predictive validity’ is reported in a recent peer-reviewed journal article (Good & MacKeith, 2021). 

We will publish the 2nd Edition of the Family Star Plus shortly as well as guidance on how to use the Family Star Plus (2nd Ed.) within the new Supporting Families framework.

Please contact our Research Analyst, Dr Anna Good (anna@triangleconsulting.co.uk) if you would like to find out more.

Coming home with the Home Star

Posted on by Donna

Outcomes Star for homelessness gets a radical overhaul

Over the 20 years since we first started working on an outcomes tool for homelessness, a huge amount has changed in the sector. In response, we’ve undertaken a major review of the Outcomes Star. The resulting Home Star is now published – and it’s a truly person-centred Star for homeless people.

The Outcomes Star, commonly known as the Homelessness Star, was Triangle’s first ever outcomes tool. At its heart from the beginning were the principles of empowerment and collaboration that have informed Triangle’s work ever since. And its structure, with the simple yet engaging Star shape underpinned by a five-stage Journey of Change, has become the basis of the whole constellation of Stars that followed it.

Appropriately enough for a tool with collaboration at its heart, it came about through an initial collaboration with St Mungo’s back in 2002. We worked with St Mungo’s to design an outcomes tool, then developed it in collaboration with the London Housing Foundation and other homelessness charities to publish the Homelessness Star in 2006. It has been a resounding success and is widely used within the sector.

But with close to 50 Stars now published and more than 60 research studies supporting the Star’s validity, we’ve learned a lot since that first Star. We’ve come to know what resonates with service users, how to ensure that the stages in the Journey of Change are absolutely clear, and how to make sure each Star is measuring the things that really matter. It was time to put that learning back into the Homelessness Star.

"This version is much better. It’s much more user friendly, much more accurate, the terms are much more identifiable for end users. I think it’s a massive improvement. You’ve really addressed it, it’s bang up to date, the language is particularly good. Especially changes in safety and crime, and ‘Trust and hope’, is far better than ‘motivation’. Our keyworkers feel it does address all the issues."
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Crisis
“A person experiencing homelessness feels like they have an insurmountable knot to untangle. The Home Star helps untangle the knot of issues. The issues can be itemised and separated out, allowing the person to concentrate on each area and go on to see and feel the changes in their lives as a result”.
Ex-service user
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Time for a rethink

We had updated the Homelessness Star in 2017, but increasingly felt that it needed a more radical overhaul. As a social enterprise, Triangle invests part of the licence fee for Stars in keeping them under review and up to date – and we wanted to make a big investment in our first Star. So in April 2020 we formally kicked the process off with a Round Table of users of the Homelessness Star (see the Reviewing the Star box below).

Three main things drove the rethink. First and foremost, the language needed changing. Our more recent Stars are even more trauma-informed as we have learnt how to word them to avoid triggers or any suggestion of blame – so we wanted to bring that learning into what would be the new Home Star. And while the original Homelessness Star was also person-centred, the thinking on that has moved on and there was more that could be done to eliminate jargon, focus on the service user’s real concerns and put them right at the centre.

Secondly, the sector itself has changed rapidly over recent years. When we first wrote the Homelessness Star, the main clients were single homeless men. Today far more women and families are accessing services, and people often have significantly more complex needs. And with increasing pressures on funding, many homelessness services are offering shorter-term interventions.

Thirdly, the external environment for people experiencing or at risk of homelessness has got tougher. There’s less social housing, the cost of living is sky high, and access to work has become even tougher. It was important to reflect all that more explicitly in the new edition of the Star.

“We’re really proud of the new Home Star,” says Triangle director Sara Burns. “It was our first flagship Star, and we wanted to make it as good and relevant and accessible as it could possibly be. So we’re delighted at the way it’s being received. We’ve had feedback that it’s ‘bang up to date’, with the language being particularly good. And perhaps most importantly, it’s person-centred to its very core.”

The new Home Star

At a glance: what’s changed in the Home Star 

  • There’s trauma-informed language throughout – for example: “You don’t have the help you need or are not ready to engage with it. Perhaps it doesn’t work for you or it’s hard to trust it”.
  • The Star works for women and families and for people with complex needs.
  • There are explicit references to external factors that are beyond the control of the service and of the service user.
  • The former “Motivation and responsibility” area has become “Trust and hope” and is completely different.
  • The old “Offending” area has been reworked as “Safety and crime”, focusing much more on homeless people being victims of crime.
  • The “Alcohol and drugs” area now recognises that drinking or taking drugs can be a coping strategy.
  • The “Meaningful use of time” scale has become “How I spend my time” and focuses more on what is meaningful for the service user.
  • There are more accessible materials, including Flashcards for people with limited English or who struggle with forms.

Reviewing the Star: the process

Gathering feedback
– Continuous input over many years through our trainers and implementing leads
– Meeting with MEAM and others
– Workshop organised by Brighton Women’s Centre
– Round Table in April 2020
– Wide call for feedback

Testing successive drafts
– Drafts sent for feedback in April and Nov 2021
– Workshop with Psychologically Informed Environments (PIE) in Dec 2021
– Final version Jan 2022
– Launch webinar Mar 2022
– New Star available April 2022

A major collaboration: organisations contributing to the review

How to start with the new Star

For new Star users, the process is simple – get in touch with Triangle (details below), get a licence and some training and you can start using the Home Star straightaway.

For organisations already using the Homelessness Star, switching is free for all licence holders, and there’s guidance on the Triangle website on how to do it with minimum disruption. There’s also support for licensed trainers. However it’s important to realise that the new Home Star is significantly different from the Star it replaces. The data won’t match (for example, the “Trust and hope” area is entirely different from the old “Motivation and responsibility”, so there needs to be a period of adjustment.

“There will be an interruption in the continuity of detailed data when switching over, and you will need to update your internal policy and other documentation mentioning the Star,” says Sara Burns. “But we’re confident that the effort of switching is well worth it.”

Next steps

Human Learning Systems – A practical guide to doing public management differently

Posted on by Donna

This article was originally published by the Centre for Public Impact.

Last year, we worked with several organisations to release an e-book – Human Learning Systems: Public Service for the Real World. This had one key message: if we want to achieve real outcomes in the world, then we need to do public management differently. That is, we need to plan and organise public service in a radically different way.

Back in 2016-17, when a few of us first began to explore this idea, this was a distinctly heretical position to take. The people that spoke to us for our first report did so on condition of anonymity. Fast forward five years. Now, not only do we have a good picture of what an alternative approach to public management looks like, we have over 50 case studies of that in practice from around the world. And those who have been at the vanguard of this practice, like Plymouth Council, are winning national awards for doing so.

At the same time, across Scotland’s health and social care system, there is a growing appetite to commission differently, to better focus on creating the conditions for people to achieve the outcomes that matter most to them. That’s why Healthcare Improvement Scotland and Iriss commissioned the Centre for Public Impact to create a practical guide for organisations who want to use a Human Learning Systems approach to public management. 

We’re excited that the guide, Human Learning Systems: A practical guide for the curious, is now ready for organisations to use. But, before we ask you to dive in, we wanted to share a little about the journey we’ve been on so far, the need for this resource, and what you can expect.

Recognising the complexity of our lives

Human Learning Systems begins with the recognition that real outcomes are created by the unique combination of actors and factors, and the relationships and interactions between them, that make up a person’s life.

Sturmberg, JP (2018) Health System Redesign How to Make Health Care Person-Centered, Equitable,and Sustainable. Springer, Australia. p238

The exact combination of relationships between actors and factors that create a desirable outcome in one person’s life will be different to another person’s. And, it will change over time, as our lives evolve, and the world changes.

Learning as a Management Strategy

Therefore, if we care about outcomes, we need a different approach to public management which recognises this complexity. We need Learning as Management Strategy. This is what our new guide to Human Learning Systems helps organisations get to grips with. Our guide enables those engaged in any aspect of social action or public service to organise themselves to have the best chance of creating genuine outcomes in the complex environments of people’s lives.

Learning as Management Strategy changes the focus of what can be planned and managed. Rather than trying to meticulously pre-plan and organise a programme of activity in someone’s life, it enables public facing workers to learn together with the people they serve. They can learn about the unique nature of each person’s life as a complex system – the key relationships and the driving factors in their life – and how all of those things interact. And then, when they have learnt together, it enables the workers and those being served, to explore and experiment together around what helps to produce better and different outcomes in people’s lives.

HLS Learning Cycle

All of this exploration and experimentation generates challenges for how systems at other scales are planned and managed – how teams, organisations, places and nations work. And so the managers at these scales need to undertake the same processes of learning and experimentation – to ensure that the action-learning which supports the creation of real outcomes happens rigorously, efficiently and effectively.

Human Learning Systems: A practical guide for the curious

All of these action-learning processes can be planned and managed.

Our new guide is designed to help people understand the practical actions they will likely need to take to plan, organise and undertake these action-learning activities.

The guide incorporates case study examples, written by Andy Brogan from Easier Inc, and Mark Smith from Gateshead Council, to illustrate the applications of the framework in real life. It draws on the richness of their experiences to explore the detailed methods they use, the obstacles they encountered, and how they responded to those obstacles, all while placing learning at the heart of their approach.

The guide was also tested with public sector and voluntary organisations across Scotland who supported us in further iterating and developing it so it can support experimentation in different contexts. 

How can you help?

This is just the beginning. We’re keen to keep testing and iterating the guide and keep asking the question: “what help do people need to adopt a Human Learning Systems approach?” We’ll be seeking feedback from everyone who downloads it – was it useful? How could it be better? Do write to us and tell us how you’re using the guide. With your help, we can truly create something extraordinary.

Explore the guide

We’ve worked with partners to develop a practical new guide to help you apply the Human Learning Systems approach to your work. Download the guide to begin your journey towards more human public services.

Download the guide
This article was originally published by the Centre for Public Impact.
Written by:
Toby Lowe Visiting Professor in Public Management

Chandrima Padmanabhan Senior Associate, Europe
View biography

Making change visible: The Outcomes Star captures important achievements that could be missed by focusing on hard outcomes

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As the creators of a suite of measures capturing distance travelled towards ‘hard outcomes’ we are sometimes asked whether there is evidence that Star readings correlate with or predict outcomes such as offending or employment. In some cases, we hear there is resistance to using the Star and instead commissioners, managers or funders are only interested in how many service users have ticked the box of meeting these hard outcomes. This misses out on capturing important achievements, ignores the role of internal change in maintaining concrete achievements and disincentives working with those most in need of support.

This briefing describes some of the evidence we have of the ‘predictive validity’ of the Star – that it does in fact predict outcomes such as school attendance, employment, training and accommodation status. This includes findings reported in two articles recently published in peer-reviewed journals.

In it, we also explain the value of the Outcomes Star in measuring the full journey leading up to and including changes in behaviour or circumstances.

The author of this briefing, Dr Anna Good, draws on her expertise in behaviour change theory to summarise the strong evidence base supporting the importance of the changes assessed by the Star. It is clear from the research literature (and our extensive experience of working with service providers), that early steps on the Star’s ‘Journey of Change’ such as acknowledging problems and accepting help are often essential to subsequent change in hard outcomes. Moreover, change in skills, confidence and beliefs are often key factors in the maintenance of life-changing improvements.

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Please download our new briefing, ‘The Outcomes Star captures important achievements that could be missed by focusing on hard outcomes’.  If you would like more information or support about the use of Star data, please get in touch with us at info@triangleconsulting.co.uk or +44 (0) 207 272 8765.

The Outcomes Star as a management information tool

Posted on by Donna
The Outcomes Star is well established as a tool for supporting effective keywork and demonstrating achievements. Here, 'Triangle's Research Analyst, Dr Anna Good, discusses a third benefit, the opportunity for internal learning. This new briefing describes how Star data can be used to improve service delivery.

Learning from Star data at all levels of the organisation

Over three-quarters of Outcomes Star users in our client survey said Star data reports were ‘useful for learning how their service was ‘doing’ and ‘helpful in managing or developing the ‘service’. Indeed, Star data can provide meaningful management information at all levels, from a service manager reviewing a single ‘worker’s caseload to a senior management team reviewing data aggregated across services. 

Alongside other data (e.g. satisfaction surveys, output and process data), Star data reports, such as those available from our upgraded Star Online System, allow organisations to ask increasingly focused questions about what is happening with the people they support.

Managers can gain essential insights by looking at differences in starting points and change across outcome areas, client groups, and service settings.  Because these insights are likely to be greatest when compared against prior expectations, Triangle has produced resources to support ‘Star data ‘forecasting’.

Learning from Initial Star readings

The distribution of first Star readings provides a valuable overview of people’s needs coming into the service. Star readings can be compared against expectations to ensure that service users are entering the service appropriately and are offered suitable interventions.

An excellent example of the use of first readings is in Staffordshire County Council, where they look at start readings to see if the families are at the right level of service. In our interview with the Commissioning Manager at the time, she told us that “if we have families in our Family Intervention service that have readings of five, I look a bit deeper to see if we’re really using our resources correctly”.

Learning from change in Star readings

Movement in Star readings for each outcome area also provides an opportunity to learn where things are going well and when further exploration of service delivery may be warranted. 

For example, if one service shows different outcomes to another service, this is a starting point for further investigation:

  • Is there other evidence that one service facilitates better outcomes than another?
  • Are there reasons why one service might be supporting people better than another?
  • Is the service user profile different in the different services?
  • Is practice significantly different in that service, and might there be lessons for other services?

A more in-depth analysis of the movement from each Journey of Change stage is also possible, offering more significant potential for learning than typical numerical outcome scales. Managers can explore which stage transitions are happening frequently and where there may be blockages to making other transitions. For example, a service may be very good at helping service users to begin accepting help but struggle more with moving them towards greater self-reliance, limiting the progress currently being made. Specific changes to service delivery might then need to be developed.

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Please download our new briefing, ‘The Outcomes Star as a management information tool‘ for more detail on how Star data reports can be used to improve service delivery. If you would like more information or support about the use of Star data, please get in touch with us at info@triangleconsulting.co.uk or +44 (0) 207 272 8765.

Outcomes Star Licensed Trainers – Continual Professional Development programme (CPD)

Posted on by Donna
In this blog, Laura Baker, Trainer/ Implementation Lead and Kate Hamill, Training Manager of the Outcomes Star, detail how Triangle has launched a new online annual CPD programme to support licensed trainers.

Before the pandemic, we were all familiar with training delivered face-to-face in city-centre venues, and Triangle had already started trialling new ways to support licensed trainers. Still, the pandemic accelerated our plans to develop and deliver a new CPD training programme online for our global Outcome Star licensed trainer community.

Our CPD programme has increased engagement, increased communication and generated significantly more opportunities to share top tips and good practices.

"That was a really enjoyable and informative session. Many people could take a leaf from your book, such a pleasant group of people to be involved with. Please pass on my respect and appreciation".

During the last twelve months,  we have delivered a wide range of informative and interactive sessions focussed on supporting our community of licensed trainers (LT’s) across the globe. We aim to provide key ‘takeaways’ in every session for licensed trainers to immediately use in their own training rooms.  The intensive development and delivery process results have been very positive, and over 53% of our global Licensed Trainers have already attended sessions. 

Our new and free online CPD programme is now available to book for 2022, using both MS Teams and Zoom to deliver the sessions.

“The (CPD ) sessions are an inspiration.”

We are committed to providing the highest quality training support to ensure the highest quality use of the Outcome Star suite of tools. We want to thank all those who have attended, and we look forward to welcoming more of our Outcomes Star licensed trainer community into your free CPD sessions soon.

Licensed Trainers can download the full timetable with details and registration information here or book their places below.

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Please note that the above sessions are subject to change. Licensed Trainers must complete a total of 6 hours of CPD training across the year in order to maintain their LT status. These sessions cover a range of subjects and draw on specialist knowledge and information across Triangle and beyond. Licensed Trainers are encouraged to book sessions in areas that are of interest to their work and organisations.

For more information on how to become a Licensed Trainer and the CPD sessions please contact us.