Using Indicators and Targets to monitor progress

Collecting data

By now, you should now have enough information to start collecting data for these indicators. Data should be collected as early as possible so that you have a good baseline against which to measure change.

Again, this is a job that’s best delegated to ensure that someone (an individual or organisation) is responsible for each indictor. For some indicators this will be relatively easy but for others—especially those involved in short-term data collection—it could be more time-consuming and may require integration with other data collection carried out by the authority or your partners.

Trajectories

Once you have set final targets you might want to break the task up by outlining a trajectory. A trajectory is the path to be taken in order to meet a final target. For example your target could be to improve an indicator by 20% by 2010 and an associated trajectory might be a 5% improvement by 2006, 10% by 2008 and 20% by 2010.

Trajectories can be considered as intermediate targets. If the full target seems a long way off, meeting trajectory targets can help give the partnership the reassurance that its work is effective and provide a sense of achievement and momentum.

Trajectories that assume a constant improvement over time (a linear trajectory) are the easiest to set. However, their use is inappropriate if much of the improvement can be achieved rapidly by ‘quick wins’ in the early years of the action plan leaving a proportion of more difficult improvements to be made in later years. If this is likely, a careful assessment is needed of the likely magnitude of the effect of these quick wins, and the time scale within which they can be achieved. Conversely, the improvement may rely on a long-term project that shows fewer benefits in the early years.

Ensuring that targets are met

Where data is available it’s worth reviewing targets regularly. This will allow you to check whether you’re on track, and, if not, make the necessary adjustments to correct that. Preferably this would be done by modifying your actions to try and work towards the target more effectively. However in some cases—especially in the early stages of accessibility planning—it may be necessary to adjust the target itself. You might find, for example, that some targets were met far too easily, while others may have been completely unrealistic. Bear in mind, however, that it’s best to avoid altering targets as far as possible.

An important way to make sure that progress towards targets is reviewed is to incorporate targets into as many relevant strategies as possible. As mentioned above, at least one of your targets must be presented in the Full Accessibility Strategy as a performance target against which the Strategy will be measured. In addition, where relevant, targets should be incorporated into strategies and progress reports produced by your partners’ organisations.

In short the more people who have an interest in meeting these targets the more likely they are to be met.

Building a better knowledge base

It is important to appraise potential solutions fully before putting them into place to ensure that they are the best suited to your particular situation. In this way, the solutions implemented by your partnership will have the best chance of successfully meeting the targets you have set. However, to a large degree accessibility planning is a learning process and your partnership may decide on innovative solutions, or ones that haven’t been tried in an area like yours before. Just because a particular type of intervention was successful elsewhere doesn’t mean it will have the same effects in your authority. In these situations it is particularly important that you collect as much information as possible about the implementation and the effects of the solution.
As accessibility planning is a relatively new approach, the change in your indicators and the success or failure of your solutions to meet their targets will add to the general understanding of the role of accessibility in improving quality of life. The data that results from your accessibility work will be useful at the local level; you will begin to build up detailed knowledge of important issues and appropriate solutions in your area, and your findings may well be useful to other local authorities as well.

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