Four councils have been chosen to pilot the Public Service Improvement Framework (PSIF) within social work services following an event in March which looked at the work required to use PSIF to carry out Social Work inspections to the standard required by the Social Work Inspection Agency (SWIA). Scottish Borders, City of Edinburgh, West Dunbartonshire and North Ayrshire councils will begin the pilot in late autumn. The lessons learned and leading practice will be shared once the pilots are finished.
One of the key founding aims of the PSIF was to reduce the duplication involved in attaining Excellence and satisfying the various audit and inspection regimes which govern service delivery within public sector organisations. With this in mind, the IS
team continues to focus on this as a key priority.
A similar process to the SWIA approach will be considered for piloting our QMIE 2 mapping work with HMIE. However, the next mapping exercise with HMIE will be with regard to the Child Protection Indicators; work will begin on this in August 2009.
An initial meeting has been scheduled in late July with the Scottish Housing Regulator to discuss mapping PSIF with their Housing Management Inspection Framework and further details will be published on the PSIF Community of Practice (CoP)as this progresses.
Initial mapping has been completed with an Equalities Framework created by the IDeA. This initial mapping is currently being reviewed by other PSIF officers and it will then be passed to Equalities Officers and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission for consultation. It is likely that the Equalities Mapping and Guidance material will be available on the CoP in September.
Finally, we have held a couple of meetings with representatives of Audit Scotland. There has been a welcome and
positive response to our request to map PSIF to the BV2 toolkits and we are awaiting confirmation from Audit Scotland of the
most appropriate officer to assist us in this process.
