Statistical Review 2016 – 2017
For the last 9 months centres have been grappling with the new statistical returns which were a result of change of information requested by the Ministry of Justice. As you know we use Survey Monkey as this is the most cost effective way for us to collect the information but we also know it is not always user friendly so I would like to thank everyone for returning their stats.
Not only do we have to give these figures to the Ministry of Justice but we also use figures when raising the awareness of NACCC amongst MPs, the media and when applying for other funding that can benefit all the centres and the children. We really want to be providing accurate information and centres are doing themselves an injustice and not giving a true picture of all the hard work you are doing and the number of children that you are helping. The statistics are a requirement of your accreditation and failure to provide your returns will put your centre as lapsed until they have been received. This will also affect any funding that you could receive from Cafcass as we have to provide them the information on a quarterly basis.
I have received feedback from many centres and wanted to share with you how to answer some of the questions that are causing concern:
Recording referrals direct from court
The first issue has been regarding referrals and where your referrals come from. We tried to put on the form the most common areas that referrals are received. Some centres have said that they have received referrals direct from the courts. Where this is the case you would put your number in the ‘other’ box and specify courts in the next question.
Available sessions and how many booked?
One of the biggest areas causing concern is number of available sessions and how many of the available sessions were booked. In most supported centres this has been relatively straight forward as centres can be open every Saturday from 10am to 12pm. Therefore the number of available sessions is 12 in a quarter. It has become more difficult for supervised centres that can be open 9am to 5pm 6 days a week and one family may have come for 1 hour and another for 2 hours. In this situation I would suggest using the number of available sessions by hours (8 hours per day x 6 x 12 = 576 sessions) and then the number of booked sessions would be the total hours that had families attending. What is most important is to always use the same method each time you do your return.
Statistical information
Please see link below to the latest figures for the year 2016-17. You will see that these include the total numbers of accredited centres as at 1st April 2017. Previously we reported on the number of centres that had provided data for all 4 quarters however on analysing the information not all centres would necessarily have to submit all four especially if they are new centres. This year I have therefore given the total number of statistics required by centres for each quarter and then looked at the total number received; this has therefore improved the overall % of accredited centres returning statistics to 52% which is a more accurate picture. Thanks again to everyone who has submitted these returns.
