About
Children's services mapping is an on-line data collection and reporting system that aims to provide information about services for children and young people in England. It is a source of information for anyone interested in children and maternity service provision and investment. Information is kept up-to-date through an annual data collection exercise that records change over time.
Purpose
The purpose of the mapping exercise is to:
- Contribute to the monitoring of progress in the implementation of Every Child Matters, the Children's Plan, the Children's National Service Framework and related agendas
- Support local authorities, primary care trusts and other partners in developing joint commissioning strategies
- Support the development of Comprehensive Area Assessments (CAA)
- Support joint service planning, development and provision
- Act as a source of data for national, regional and local performance monitoring
- Assist in the bid for resources
- Facilitate local benchmarking
- Enable information on service outputs to be triangulated with data from other sources
- Provide annual updates for the development and maintenance of local service directories.
Scope
Children’s Services Mapping collects and reports information about services, including: what is provided; for whom; how services are staffed; what policy objectives are being met and what activity is undertaken. Financial data is also gathered so that service provision can be linked to investment. With this comprehensive description of services, CSM data is used for monitoring performance at the level of individual services as well as organisationally, regionally and nationally.
All types of children's services are mapped except schools which are subject to a separate data collection exercise. The aim of the exercise is to create a description of all the services that fall under the responsibility of Children's Trusts, irrespective of which agency provides the services or how the services are commissioned/funded.
