Background:
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children have the right to express their views on what constitutes good quality in the systems and services designed for them. Today, the quality of services for children and young people is measured primarily through indicators related to organisational structures, processes, and the use of resources. These measures are designed from an adult perspective. As a result, the information collected says little or nothing about how children themselves experience the actual outcomes of the services they receive, such as whether they feel safe, experience trusting relationships, or find the support helpful. This also limits efforts to improve quality and to carry out effective monitoring and inspection
Why are quality measurements most often designed from an adult perspective? Why are the actual outcomes for the children the services are intended to support not measured?
- Adults often assume that they are responsible for defining and measuring quality, believing that they know better than children how this should be done. As a result, experts from different professional fields become the primary contributors to the development of quality measures.
- Adults tend to measure what they can observe, count, and understand themselves. Although an increasing number of researchers ask children about whether support has been helpful, there are still few examples of children’s own experiences of benefit being systematically measured and used to define and improve the quality of services.
What ChangeFactory does:
Since 2009, ChangeFactory has conducted national qualitative surveys with children across different areas affecting childhood and adolescence. The findings show, among other things, that many children have received services for long periods without being involved in decisions about the content, structure, or course of the support or help they received. They have also rarely been asked whether they experienced the support as helpful. A consistent message from children has been that they need opportunities to express what kind of support and help they feel they need, which adults they feel safe with, and to speak up if the support they receive is not helping, so that it can be adjusted accordingly.
What ChangeFactory is doing now:
- Develops quality indicators based on what children themselves describe as most important when services for children are designed, delivered, and improved. These indicators can be used to measure how children experience the quality and usefulness of services.
- Pilots these child-informed quality indicators in several Norwegian municipalities. The indicators are refined through dialogue with professionals and legal experts to ensure that they are both meaningful to children and applicable in practice.
