As children and young peoples' views and feedback are captured in Viewpoint, professionals are able to access this data in real time, not only for use in work with individual children & young people but also to report on the collective views and experiences of children and young people and their families.

And this assists managers and senior practitioners to address key fundamental questions in relation to their practice and services.

Most importantly:
- What works for which service users in which circumstances?

So how does Viewpoint's online tool work?

As each young person, parent or carer, accesses their Viewpoint, their responses are automatically saved as data that managers and practitioners can view and report on simply by logging into Viewpoint's Management Centre.

For children and young people prior to their children in care reviews, Child Protection conferences, or as part of their Youth Justice AssetPlus self-assessments.

Originally designed by IROs for use to inform review and planning processes to enhance young people’s meaningful participation whether or not they physically attend their review meetings. Child’s Journey reporting is now commonly used wherever young people are involved in programmes of work or where the intervention is more than one-off.

Child’s Journey reports are graphical – accessible to workers and engaging for use with young people.

Showing young people’s self-reported journeys as an overall picture (general improvement), by factors such as local pledges, and in detail for each question.

Where young people’s responses indicate changes, for example, from more negative to more positive feedback, these are highlighted through use of graphics.

These reports encourage the assessment process to avoid over-reliance on general, anecdotal feedback to an approach based on more accurate picture of young people’s lives by breaking down what is going well or not over specific timescales.

An example of how categorising young people’s feedback by factors over time is shown here:

Here, the child’s journey report shows this young person’s feedback over a period of three reviews and 9 months where they self-report a consistently positive or improving picture related to Self-Care Skills, Emotional and Behavioural Development, Education, Social Presentation.

However, this young person shows a less positive and worsening view towards their Care Planning.

How Safe do you feel?

In this example, Viewpoint’s Frequency reporting is used by the local manager to generate graphical reports showing the collective feedback of young people in care aged 7 to 9 years old self-reporting how SAFE they feel by reporting on young people’s average responses over time – in this case by quarter over a 12 month period.

If this report shows areas of concern, e.g. showing lower levels of ‘feeling safe’, or where average responses are less positive over time, or where safety is reported less positively by different age groups, Viewpoint provides an extensive range of analysis and reporting tools for local managers to drill down and investigate this further.

How is your Identity and sense of Self while being in our care?

In this example, the manager is asking the question: ‘How do young people aged 10 to 15 years feel about their experience of being in care and support received related to their Identity and view of Self?’.

Again, this is shown as a graphical report by quarter over a 12 month period and shows this group of young people’s average response to the question: ‘Do you have a life story book, photos or information about people who are important to you?’ is significantly more negative compared to how they answered other questions on their ability ’to follow religious and family customs’, choosing how they ’look and dress’ and having ’things they need for their personal care’.

How were these findings used?

In this case, the authority responded to this finding by changing local policies and increasing their resources to enhance life story or memory box working with all children in their care. Subsequent Voice of the child reporting confirmed that young people’s perception improved significantly since new ways of working were introduced.

Viewpoint reporting can also show young people’s responses to ‘open response’ questions, i.e. where they’re invited to type in feedback in their own words.

Young people’s actual quotes can be used to effectively illustrate and emphasise issues and finding, providing authenticity and vividness in Voice of the Child reporting for managers previously used to receiving dryer, more traditional reports – agendas, text and spreadsheets.

The example below shows how direct quotes for young people aged 10 to 15  can be used to show their collective view of: ‘What’s Gone Well?’, ‘What’s been difficult?’ and ‘Why they are not going to their review?’.

In this example, local managers in a large authority are able, through a simple two button operation, to answer the question: ’How many times have young people in care aged 10 to 14 years in my authority accessed their pre-review Viewpoint self-assessment over a 12 month period by placement type?’

This type of monitoring report can just as easily provide a breakdown of young people’s participation by gender, ethnicity, SEN status, or where they live.

It can be filtered by time period, e.g. for the previous 12 month period or for quarterly reporting.

Moving from anecdotal to evidence-based voice of the child reporting

Viewpoint’s summary reporting functionality enables professionals to move from over-reliance on the anecdotal description of service users’ collective views and experiences to a more specific understanding of what is important to them, using inbuilt filtering and other functionality designed to support comparative reporting.

• Individual workers or teachers use Viewpoint’s reporting tool to identify issues related to their particular caseload or class. These reports are also referred to in professional supervision.

As one North London Director of Children's Services reported:

'Using Viewpoint in supervision effectively brings the young person into the room.'

• First line operational managers and senior practitioners use the reporting tool to inform practice improvement and workforce development processes and to demonstrate the impact of their own team or project’s services on young people’s outcomes and wellbeing.
• Information managers generate reports on young people’s self-reported wellbeing to senior managers and policy makers to measure performance against organisational priorities and policies, e.g. user feedback on performance against local pledges, or for evidence in inspections and audits.

If you would like to learn more about Viewpoint’s Voice of the Child reporting capability, please click here.

Viewpoint also provides a bespoke Voice of the Child reporting service that Children's Services managers can commission to produce a range of management information dashboard reporting for groups such as SMTs, Corporate Parenting Panels.

Click here to view an example (anonymised) of one of these reports – please note that in this case, young people’s responses to children in care review consultations are used to show their experience of how well local pledges are being delivered.