The Evaluation Report

Three research units are working together to evaluate the pilot programme. They are the Personal Social Services Research Unit, the Social Care Workforce Research Unit and the Social Policy Research Unit. Together they form the Individual Budgets Evaluation Network (IBSEN).

Now that the pilot has been completed, we are expecting to receive IBSEN's final evaluation report in Spring 2008. You can read more about the Evaluation here.

Resource Toolkit

From April 2008, the Social Care Reform Grant will be allocated to local authorities to help transform their social care services. This follows on from the launch of Putting People First on 10 December 2007.

The Department of Health and sector leaders are developing a programme to support councils in redesigning their systems over the next three years.

One strand of this work will be a resource toolkit - developed by the Care Services Improvement Partnership - that provides advice and tools for councils wishing to start personalising their services.

Based on learning from the Individual Budget pilots and In Control, the kit will include:

• A Planning for Transformation tool to help councils make robust judgements about the benefits, costs and sustainability of a change to self-directed support.
  
• Assistance for developing resource allocation systems.
  
• A data tool developed by In Control to enable councils to collect and report evidence on costs and satisfaction.
  
• Care Services Efficiency Delivery tools to establish package costs.
  
• Advice on an efficient end-to-end process and support system for councils to support new ways of working.
  
• Guidance to help offer a range of approaches to sustainable support planning and brokerage.
  
• Help with aligning income streams into individual budgets.
  
• Good practice guidance and examples on deployment, so people have multiple options for managing support.
  
• An equal access tool to help remove the potential barriers that some groups of people may experience.

Copyright CSIP 2006