A Community Justice Improvement Tool – local evidence for national outcomes

The National Strategy for Community Justice sets the national direction for community justice by building on progress made to date. It is designed to provide a clear roadmap for future improvement work, by highlighting key areas for partners to focus on. Alongside the National Strategy, Scottish Government have launched a revised performance framework designed to help assess whether the priority actions set out in the strategy are being achieved. The Community Justice Performance Framework has re-framed priority actions in the strategy as nationally determined outcomes, so that partners are clear on what they are aiming to change.

CJS has created the Community Justice Improvement Tool to complement the national framework at a local level. This tool will help drive improvement in local areas, setting out the local supporting evidence that should be taken into account year-round to help local community justice partners plan and monitor improvement activities. These will help contextualise the CJPF performance information on a yearly basis and support the local and national partners in performance monitoring and reporting, but it can also do more than that when used continuously by local partnerships throughout the planning and reporting cycle.

Local areas will develop, gather and utilise information in collaboration with CJS to support improvement and to report on the achievement of the nationally determined outcomes, and provide CJS with local evidence as part of their annual reporting for Scotland. CJS will support implementation of the Improvement Tool throughout the coming year and beyond, and work with partners to help drive and monitor improvement in community justice.

Explore the Community Justice Improvement Tool here