Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council: Corporate Guidance Handbook on Equalities Monitoring

Stockport Council commissioned us in the autumn of 2005 to produce a corporate guidance handbook on equalities monitoring in service provision.

The aim of the guidance was to promote a consistent approach to the equalities monitoring of service provision in Stockport Council. The target audience included managers and officers responsible for the development and operation of monitoring systems and those who are in a position to change service provision in response to data.

Consultation across directorates highlighted some of the questions and issues which managers wanted the guidance to clarify. We were keen that the guide should be comprehensive, covering all aspects of the monitoring process from deciding what to monitor, through collecting and storing the data, to interpreting and acting on it.

We took a number of steps to make sure that busy managers were not deterred by the length of the guide. These included an extended contents page/ executive summary at the start, which consisted of the most frequently asked questions from the consultation, with a summarised answer and a signpost to the pages in the report where this issue was covered in more detail.

We included information about the local community profile, signposts to internal resources (both contacts and other relevant policy documents) and used real local examples to provide practical illustrations wherever possible. This gave the document a local, organisationally-tailored feel.

Through our consultation, we were able to identify common challenges and issues, such as the tendency for managers to focus on the data collection process rather than its application. We developed a simple visual model, the Monitoring Cycle, to emphasise the role of monitoring as a tool for continuous improvement.

At the launch of the guidance, managers commented that the document felt very practical and that it helped to share good practice, of which they were not previously aware, across directorates.