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Children and Young Persons Bill [HL]

Perhaps I should say a little more about evaluation and controls. On pages 48 and 49 of Consistent Care Matters, the report by the group chaired by Professor Le Grand, evaluation is addressed, as is the control group against which the pilots will be compared. The report says that the group considers that a thorough and robust evaluation of the pilots is essential and that this should involve a comparison of the pilots’ performance with those of selected local authorities acting as controls. That is not the Government funding them to be controls, but simply looking at their performance. The report’s recommendation is that the performance of social work practices should be compared against the performance of three controls: first, the pilot authority; secondly, the performance of a best practice local authority; and, thirdly, the performance of an average local authority, to provide a fair assessment of its impact.