The Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) has published an essay on the nature and future of local government improvement. 'Getting better all the time? An independent assessment of local government improvement and its future prospects ' looks back on what has been learnt from the last eight to 10 years, and forward to how that improvement journey might develop.
The work was carried out by Clive Grace, a former council chief executive and now an honorary research fellow at Cardiff University, and Steve Martin, Director of the Centre for Local and Regional Research, Cardiff University.
The aims of the publication are:
- functional: to bring together what is known about improvement, and build on earlier work to help inform the work of improvement agencies;
- symbolic: to reflect back to the sector - and central government - how far local government has come and how much it knows about improvement, thus lending support to the continuing devolution of responsibility for improvement;
- directional: to provide an indication of how to continue the journey in a challenging environment, and how to move - to quote the title of the Local Government Association (LGA) policy paper from September 2005 - "beyond competence"
Two versions of the essay are now available to download on the IDeA website.
