In the latest Good in Practice webinar, we widened the lens from good Care Act assessments and funding decisions to look at what good practice means across an Adult Social Care service.

We explored examples from councils around the country, focusing on three areas – prevention, unpaid carers, and independence and choice.

One theme connected all three. Councils already have a wealth of performance and practice evidence. The opportunity is to understand what different measures tell us when viewed together.

Looking beyond a single measure

During the session, we introduced some early thinking we're developing with councils around “coherence pairs” – two related measures that we might reasonably expect to tell a similar story.

Take reablement. Increasing numbers of people going through reablement could indicate positive preventative practice. But what is happening to the number of people requiring long-term support afterwards?

Where related measures support each other, they can strengthen the evidence that something is working. Where they don't, they can provide a useful starting point for further investigation.

The question isn't simply whether an individual measure looks good, but whether the evidence around it supports the same story.

We explored what that could mean across three areas.

1. Prevention – connect investment with what happens next

Demonstrating the impact of prevention is difficult. Success can mean avoiding or delaying something that might otherwise have happened.

Examples shared during the session included Sunderland, where integrated front-door support brings together services including occupational therapy, assistive technology and reablement, and Oxfordshire, where self-assessment provides an earlier route to support within the community.

But measuring preventative activity or investment alone doesn't tell us what happens next.

76% of webinar attendees said prevention spend is rising in their authority, but long-term demand is rising too.

That doesn't tell us prevention isn't working. It gives councils a reason to look more closely at the relationship between investment and demand.

For your own service, if prevention activity or investment is increasing, what is happening to long-term demand alongside it?

2. Carers – connect outcomes with identification

Councils can measure outcomes and satisfaction for unpaid carers they already support. But those measures can't tell us about carers who haven't yet been identified.

We explored examples from Suffolk, where online self-assessment gives carers another route to share their circumstances and needs, and West Sussex, where identification and support are being considered across social care, hospitals, and primary care networks.

Our audience poll reflected the challenge.

61% said they have routes in place to identify unpaid carers before crisis, but those routes remain patchy. A further 10% described their approach as mostly reactive, while 23% were confident they had a proactive route.

Measures of carer wellbeing and satisfaction therefore become more meaningful when considered alongside how effectively carers are being identified in the first place.

If outcomes for the carers you support look positive, how confident are you that you're also reaching the carers who aren't yet visible in your data?

3. Independence and choice – look beneath the headline

Direct payment uptake is an important measure of choice and control, but an overall rate can hide significant variation between teams and different groups of people.

During the webinar, we discussed examples where uptake differed substantially within the same authority. Previous conversations with councils have also repeatedly highlighted practitioner confidence – confidence in the offer, the local market and having the conversation itself – as an important factor.

Our webinar poll showed a similar picture, with 41% of attendees identifying practitioner confidence as the biggest barrier to real choice in their service, followed by market capacity at 33%, and process and time pressure at 19%.

So a strong overall direct payment rate might only be the beginning of the story.

What happens when you break your own figure down by team, locality or different groups of people? Is choice being offered consistently?

From evidence to action

We finished the session with an early demonstration of how we're developing this thinking through Connected Insights.

Rather than focusing on individual rankings, the approach looks at related measures together – where they reinforce each other and where a difference might provide a useful place to investigate.

The Q&A also raised a very practical challenge: what if your data isn't good enough?

The consensus was to start with what is available. Imperfect data doesn't necessarily prevent useful investigation – looking at the evidence can itself expose gaps in recording, consistency and data quality.

What does your own evidence say?

The three examples we explored are only a starting point.

You could look at prevention activity alongside long-term demand. Carer outcomes alongside early identification. Direct payment uptake across different cohorts, teams, or localities.

The aim isn't to find two numbers that prove whether your service is “good” or “bad”. It's to understand whether the evidence you already have tells a consistent story – and where there may be something worth looking at more closely.

We're developing new ways to help councils make that picture clearer – from understanding the quality of individual Care Act assessments to identifying patterns across an entire service.

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