INTRODUCTION
I manage a small but long-standing charity based in Leeds – Leeds Weekend Care Association, better known locally as Weekenders Club. We run a Saturday play scheme for children aged 5 to 18 with disabilities. For their families, it’s a break from the demands of caring. For the children, it’s a fun, safe, social space – a break for them too. We also run a smaller project – the Out and About Project – which helps teenagers with disabilities access mainstream leisure activities like the cinema, theatre, eating out, or trampolining. I arrange 64 events each year for the Out and About Project and the Weekenders Club opens 47 Saturdays a year. In total, about 150 children and young people access our services. I’ve been the manager for 19 of the 25+ years the charity has existed
QUALITY: MY FIRST THOUGHTS
In 2018, I was invited to take part in a Quality Assurance pilot – Improving Quality. I’ll be honest: I wasn’t exactly excited about it. I felt I knew my organisation inside and out. I knew our families and I knew the services well. I had personal experience too – my own son, who is autistic, used the Weekenders Club when he was young. As a parent, I knew what mattered. I had good staff, strong policies, and a good enough grip on what needed improving. In short – I felt I was doing “fine.”
So why did I say yes?
Because I’m the only manager here. The weight of responsibility is heavy – and no one else is going to tell me where I’m going wrong. I figured putting the charity under a microscope might be difficult, but ultimately healthy. I also wanted to validate the pride I have in our work. And yes, I hoped it might help with fundraising. A recognised quality mark does carry weight.
THE REALITY OF THE PROCESS
It wasn’t always easy. I only work 25 hours a week, and some weeks I made no progress at all. Larger organisations have the advantage of having specialised departments for their accounts, fundraising, recruitment etc. At L.W.C.A. there’s only me (part-time) and my supporting administrator, Lisa, also part-time. It’s a broad spectrum of individual tasks in the role of Manager – everything from shifting rubbish to working out budgets and plenty in between. There were some weeks where I felt swamped with the audit and had to leave the day to day stuff. It was uncomfortable – but it felt important.
Some of what I found:
PRACTICAL EXAMPLES: WHAT CHANGED
🟢 Partnerships
We had long-standing informal arrangements, but no real documentation. I’d never written a Memorandum of Understanding before. Now I do – and it’s helped enormously with clarity in partnerships, including with our freelance fundraiser. We now know:
🟢 Meetings
Before, our staff meetings were as and when required. Now, we map the whole year. Nothing gets missed. Every Monday morning we have a catch up – The Senior Play Leader, Office Manager and me – just an hour (or under) on Teams. It’s a good start to the week and helps us all to be on the same page.
The unintended consequences of this have led to a different way of working and a more cohesive team. Historically, there has always been a gap between those ‘on the shop floor’ working directly with the disabled children, and the administration. IQ has bridged the gap. I now work at the play scheme on a Saturday and the Senior Play Leader is more involved in the ‘business’ side. This gives a much more connected feel to the whole team. It also facilitates communication all the way through from volunteers to management. Everyone’s voice gets heard which makes decision making much more effective. For example, on paper it might appear that we could achieve more service delivery hours if the staff ate their lunch with the children. It is much clearer to see how this change in model wouldn’t work. The staff can only work at their best if they’ve had a break from the client group. Most of the clients have high needs, require one-to-one supervision and present with challenging behaviour. We can now all appreciate the perspective of others.
🟢 Policy Reviews
We used to review policies in batches when we had time – which often meant we didn’t! Now, we prioritise and filter them into management committee meetings on a rolling basis.
🟢 Job Roles
Staff roles had somehow evolved without formal updates. I revisited every job role, clarified responsibilities, dropped what was no longer needed, and redistributed tasks. It gave structure and confidence – especially to long-serving staff whose roles had morphed into something quite unrecognisable from their original job descriptions.
THE UNEXPECTED BENEFITS
I got much more out of the process than I anticipated. In many ways, it felt like a personalised training programme built around my organisation. There’s always the question: “How much time will it take?” Yes, it took time. But the foundation level was reassuring – much of it involved simply attaching evidence of what we already did well. And the areas that needed more work? That’s where the learning and change happened.
WHERE WE ARE NOW
As a result, I feel:
And above all else – I feel proud.
FINAL THOUGHTS
How do you measure quality when dealing with people? It seems a difficult concept to quantify. The care business is all about quality and you may feel you are doing a good job, but how can you prove it? Can others, outside the organisation, even recognise the quality of a service?
Our particular service – respite; is in great demand in Leeds. The numbers of children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) increase year on year and services are diminishing. Demand is outstripping provision. Would families therefore simply be grateful to receive a service? Just getting feedback from customers is not enough; their responses are likely to be affected by the social backdrop of the downturn in the economic climate we now are living in.
When I first embarked on this process, I asked my husband, who designs, makes and repairs stained glass windows – “how do you know that you produce quality work?” I expected him to say something about customer satisfaction being high – the comments on his website would vouch for that. He said customer satisfaction is undoubtedly important but, it’s much more than that. The customer will always see that what they have now is infinitely better than what they had before. It is about having a personal standard of craftsmanship which is unfaltering, a benchmark which is my benchmark. Often the customer will be oblivious to the lengths I go to, to make repairs look authentic – you can’t see there has been damage – I know it’s the best it can be and that’s the real satisfaction.
You don’t need to be “broken” to benefit from a process like this. You just need to be open to reflection, learning, and growth. For me, Improving Quality wasn’t about proving I was a good enough manager – it was about becoming a better one.
Although Women’s Lives Leeds(WLL) is not a formally constituted organisation, it is led and overseen by a partnership of eleven Chief Officers (which could be seen as the Trustees) who are the accountable body. They work within a partnership agreement, which is similar to a constitution and sets out purpose, aims and objectives, how the partnership will function and how decisions are made and recorded.
To test the WLL Partnership and Project Arrangements/Agreements, to help in the design of and to see if the Improving Quality Standard is appropriate for such partnership arrangements, WLL agreed to be one of the pilots to go through the award.
As a Project Manager who has experience of going through IIP and PQASSO I found the Improving Quality award much easier to follow as it focussed on what I think the most important areas in terms of having the fundamental policies and procedures in place namely: accountability; (leadership and management) Welcoming; (staff, service user involvement and support) Effective; (service delivery and monitoring it) Sustainable; (budgets and money).
Improving Quality proved to be less time-consuming, especially when running a multi-faceted project and more effective in terms of knowing if WLL had firm foundations and what our strengths and improvements were. What made the difference was that I could do all of the evidence gathering electronically and submit online, which is my preferred way of working.
The Improving Quality team offered support throughout the process and took feedback in terms of partnership arrangements to help improve the award to make it more fit for partnerships/consortia.
We experienced a level of flexibility on assessment day that clearly demonstrated that the assessor understood the complexities of a partnership overseeing and delivering a project that had delivery and staff based across the city. Our assessment preparation took one day, and the assessment took one day too.
As with all Quality Assurance awards, it’s also about what’s next and what you do between review dates.
Due to the nature of the simplicity of Improving Quality, it is much easier to use as a development tool, and I have since used it in support of a review of all
policies and procedures, which took place in February 2019.
North West Parents and Friends Association (NWPFA) is a voluntary Organisation providing person-centred services for children and adults with special needs and their families in the West of Ireland.
We work towards the fulfilment, needs and rights of people with intellectual disabilities and special needs, to achieve for each individual, the greatest possible level of health and social gain, bearing in mind at all times, the personal dignity of each individual.
In 2011 the Board of Directors decided to embrace a quality standard and in conjunction with the Disability Federation of Ireland (DFI). With the assistance of the DFI’s licensed quality standard Mentor Dermot O’Donnell, we commenced working towards implementing Level 1 of the PQASSO Quality Management Standard (QMS) in November of that year. We successfully achieved our accreditation in July 2016.
In early 2019 prior to the expiration of the PQASSO license period, the Board and Management undertook the task of deciding whether they would continue with the PQASSO Standard or explore whether other standards might be more appropriate to NWPFA. Following this process, the Board of Directors selected the “Improving Quality” (IQ) Standard, as they considered it to be:
In March 2019, NWPFA established an “IQ Quality Committee” to lead and oversee the implementation of the IQ Standard at Foundation Level in the organisation. This was conducted by Self-Assessing against all of “Requirements” in each of the four Elements of IQ. This exercise was completed in September 2019 when we applied for External Assessment and submitted our evidence and workbook via “IQ Dropbox”.
Our Site Visit took place in October 2019 where interviews and visits to our different Centres took place and further documentation requested. This Assessment was both rigorous and structured but the Assessor was very flexible and made all our Interviewees feel very comfortable during the Assessment. The Assessment was based on interviews, evidence gathered and observations in each Element of the Standard. The closing Meeting at the end of the Site Visit was very positive. Our Draft Report was received within one week of the termination of the Site Visit. We would like to acknowledge the support we received from our colleague in DFI in helping us prepare for this undertaking.
We are delighted to be the first organisation in the Republic of Ireland to be IQ accredited. Our certificate was presented to us at the annual SOLA Symposium in the University of Limerick on the 6th December 2019.
Concurrent with implementing IQ, we were also in the process of embedding the HSE Report “New Directions – Personal Support Services for Adults with Disabilities” in NWPFA. The discipline gained from Self-Assessing against the four Elements of IQ within our Day Services, greatly helped us when completing our EASI Tool for the HSE.
As our Service Users are the most important Stakeholders in our Organisation, it was a very important piece of work to develop an “Easy to Read” version of the Assessment Report to share with our Service Users. We are grateful to Community Matters Yorkshire for their kind assistance in developing this Document.
After receiving our certificate of Accreditation, we feel confident that we are compliant with the “Charities Governance Code”, “Implementation of New Directions” and meet all the legal obligations and regulations required of Charitable Organisations in the Republic of Ireland.
