Improving services in Scotland

The Deming cycle is also described as Plan/Do/Study/Act and is being used in Scotland on a grand scale.

For instance: "The Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration (SCRA) published the Care and Permanence Planning for Looked after Children in Scotland report in March 2011. This report considered the pathways and decision-making processes through the care and court systems in Scotland for 100 looked after children from the point they were first identified as at risk, to the point of adoption or permanence. The report highlighted the following key areas for improvement:"

 "Decision making and implementation"
 "Practice of the Children’s Hearing system"
 "Improvements to court processes"

"The Scottish Government responded to the SCRA report in June 2011 outlining clear expectations for improvement across permanence practice in Scotland. The Centre for Excellence for Looked after Children in Scotland (CELCIS) was commissioned to recruit a Permanence and Care Team (PaCT), charged with the development and delivery of a transformational permanence improvement programme."

http://www.celcis.org/our-work/key-areas/permanence/our-permanence-work/

What they mean by the development and delivery of a transformational permanence improvement programme is one that pushes children more speedily through the system towards permanence. For children, that could mean adoption, kinship care or a return to their parents, although the latter is the least likely outcome.

I noticed that the Permanence and Care Team (PaCT) used a Plan/Do/Study/Act cycle to achieve speedier outcomes.

 

 

Lesley Scott, TYMES Trust representative, had a lot to say about the Deming model in her recent talk given to the Scottish Liberty Forum.

"These plan/do/study/act cycles actually replicate a process that was developed in the 1950s by W. Deming, the American statistician, educator and consultant. Deming pioneered his plan/do/study/act cycles within the manufacturing industry in the hope of improving quality control based on a systematic tallying of product defects which includes the identification and analysis of their causes. Once the causes of defects are corrected, the outcomes are tracked to measure the effects of these corrections and subsequent product quality. Therefore management gains more and better knowledge about the processes and products."

"The Scottish Government has engaged an American company called the Institute of Healthcare Improvement or IHI to educate practitioners throughout all relevant public, private, and voluntary community bodies on this model for improvement."

"And then we have the family sector being subject to the same quality control methods as are used by the manufacturing sector; with the Government identifying what they consider to be defects and forcing corrective measures .... with, if necessary, threats of compulsion through GIRFEC and the Named Person legislation in order to ensure that children and families meet the state approved outcomes...."

"Children, therefore, if we are to apply the Deming management and improvement method principle as the Early Years Collaborative promotes, are viewed in the role of product and consequently families and the state must be a system working together on the production. However, if the family and the state are a system why is it only the state component that involves the setting of aims in the plan/do/study/act cycles? Why is it only the state which carries out the assessment of the knowledge and data collected and only the state which decides if any change was a success?"

"Parents and families it would seem are, in fact, being used as the problems or barriers that are built right into the system. The GIRFEC list of risk indicators reflects such an argument giving as it does a checklist of defects, errors or mistakes that require rework by the state in order to improve product quality. "

Dehumanising is the word that comes to mind.

Of course, all of this has already been set in a much broader context as explained in The 3-Step Improvement Framework for Scotland’s Public Services which was discussed by UK Column at about 33.20 minutes. The plan/do/study/act model is being used throughout one massive joined-up Scottish Government body.

It looks like the blueprint for a totalitarian state and we need to start worrying about what they have in mind for our children. The document can be found below.

http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0042/00426552.pdf