How to develop a quality assurance framework for life story work

At the beginning of 2023 I produced an internal report for Blue Cabin looking into life story work provision across England. The purpose of this research was to explore and analyse the provision of life story work with children and young people involved in the social care system across all local authorities in England.

The information sourced was to support and guide Blue Cabin in shaping their Creative Life Story Work programme, which is available to local authorities, organisations and individual practitioners.

Two sources were used to collate the information required to inform the picture of life story work provision across England: Ofsted reports, and responses following Freedom of Information (FOI) requests submitted to all English local authorities.

As part of the FOI element of this research, 152 English local authorities were contacted. They were asked a number of questions including three about the quality assurance of life story work for children in the care of the local authority, and children with a plan of adoption. The following is a summary of the responses received from the 74 local authorities who replied to the FOI:

• Question: Do you have a framework in place to track performance in relation to life story work?
• Answer: 7% said yes. 39% said no. The remaining 54% either stated not applicable, left the question unanswered or provided a response that did not directly answer this question.
• Question: Do you have any internally developed performance indicators in relation to the completion of life story work?
• Answer: 12% said yes. 49% said no. The remaining 39% either left the question unanswered or again provided an answer that did not directly answer this question.
• Question: Do you have a quality assurance framework which specifically incorporates life story work?
• Answer: 5% said yes. 51% said no. The remaining 44% either left the question unanswered or again provided an answer that did not directly answer the question.

As part of this FOI, a request was made for local authorities to share their quality assurance frameworks if they were able to. Of note, given only 5% of respondents advised they had a quality assurance framework that specifically referenced life story work, only four local authorities provided these. However, on reading these frameworks there was no specific reference to life story work in two of them. A further two local authorities did reference life story work in their frameworks but did not explore what to audit against, and none had any specific internally developed performance indicators or practice expectations.

For those local authorities who responded to the question regarding how life story work is tracked and overseen, the vast majority stated this was the responsibility of team managers and the children’s independent reviewing officers. There was no evidence of any specific tracking of life story work as a local authority as a whole, or any senior management oversight in the responses received.

As a local authority, it is highly likely that you will have an established quality assurance framework already in place for children’s services, and this will be working well. However, given the FOI responses received it is probable that your framework will not specifically focus on life story work practice and expectations.

If you recognise your local authority here, and the research I completed means this is more than likely, then you may want to consider strengthening your existing framework. If you do, there are some points you may want to consider as a starting point:

1) Life story work policy and procedure

Before you attempt to develop a bespoke quality assurance framework for life story work, you will need to have an agreed policy and procedure in place for life story work practice as this is what you will be effectively auditing quality against. If you do not have a policy and procedure, it will be impossible to quality assure practice in this area as there will be no common practice standards in place or understood by children’s practitioners, including those individuals who are responsible for the quality assurance function.

You may want to read the blog I wrote that explores how to develop a life story policy for some ideas.

Read Joanne’s blog post on developing a life story work policy>>

• As part of your policy and procedure you will want to agree on areas such as:
• An agreed frequency for life story work to be undertaken.
• The agreed ‘product’ of life story work undertaken, whatever format this may take.
• How you will track the progress and completion of life story work in line with the points above.
• Most importantly, the ‘so what’ question, and how to measure the impact of the work undertaken in respect of the child or young person.

2) Principles 

Once you have a policy and procedure in place and embedded, you will be in a position to start to develop a quality assurance framework.

You may want to consider the principles you want to adopt at the outset for example:

• Child centred – the focus needs to be on the welfare of the child.
• Restorative – working with practitioners and managers and building relationships.  As a restorative process, quality assurance will be characterised by both high support and high challenge.
• Outcomes based – the focus will be on outcomes for the child rather than processes.
• Positive – to look at informing and encouraging improvement and supporting the development of practice, rather than using the audit as a negative tool.
• Reflective – to promote reflective practice and shared learning.

3) Continuous improvement cycle

You may want to include the continuous improvement cycle into your framework to direct your quality assurance activities, for example:

• IDENTIFY – benchmark current practice and identify gaps.
• PLAN – prioritise actions and set targets based on benchmarks.
• EXECUTE – make changes and monitor performance.
• REVIEW – have changes made a difference? Benchmark again to check.
• REPEAT CYCLE

4) Audit tool

As a local authority you are likely to have any number of audit tools in place. The auditing of life story work is no different and it is possible to quite easily develop a bespoke tool for inclusion in your quality assurance framework for life story work.

Remember, if you are starting from scratch be kind to yourselves and develop this in bite size pieces. If you currently have no formal quality assurance framework for life story work, then just start with the basics. For example, audit against the agreed frequency and accepted format of life story work, whether an output of a physical or virtual ‘book’/video recordings/completed tools/photos of completed activities and so on. This may be your starting point, and you would be able to build on this the more you focus on this area of practice and in line with your policy and procedure.

As you audit life story work, you will come across innovative and outstanding practice, but also practice that is potentially inadequate. It is at this point that you will be able to build on your auditing activities as quality practice is shared, and those practitioners struggling will be able to be constructively supported and guided for the benefit of the children they work with.

Any themes that become apparent can also be usefully shared with the workforce development team to ensure bespoke training programmes can be delivered as identified and needed.

As a local authority practitioner, I have developed a number of quality assurance frameworks over the years, including practice audit tools. The most important part of this area of practice is not how effective the audit tool is, or the report that is produced following practice audits, but the difference all of this makes to the child, young person and their family.

Quality assurance activity may seem an onerous task at times, and one that is not always welcomed by practitioners and managers, but without it, how do we know about practice? If we cannot identify practice that requires improvement, how can we improve the experiences for the children, young people and their families that we work with?

Equally, if we can’t identify innovative practices, how can we communicate our expectations to all children’s services workforces? Quality assurance activity provides a unique opportunity to identify practice themes, and to enable clear expectations of practice to be communicated effectively.

If practitioners and managers do not understand what practice standards they are expected to meet, how can they be supported to improve and strengthen their practice to ensure positive impact for the child or young person?

If you have already developed a quality assurance framework specifically for life story work, please get in touch as we would love to share good practice. You can email the Creative Life Story Work team on creativelifestorywork@wearebluecabin.com.

• • Read Joanne’s guidance on developing a life story work policy and procedure>>
  • Read Joanne’s insight into UK-wide data on children in care>>