Principle 12. Governance-embedded

Governance-embedded

‘Governing bodies’ play an active role in self-evaluation. Their oversight ensures that findings inform the provider’s strategy and drive improvement.

Embedding self-evaluation in governance processes gives it weight and influence. It helps ensure that evaluation informs long-term planning, resource allocation, and institutional accountability

Reflective questions

• What opportunities, and at what stages in delivery and reporting cycles, does our governing body have to engage with our self-evaluation and understand our impact; and to feed back accordingly?
• How do we ensure that members of the governing body have opportunities to gain a sufficiently detailed strategic understanding of our core aims, without overwhelming them with operational detail?
• When reporting on our self-evaluation and impact to our governing body, how clear is the link between our values and strategic aims; our self-evaluation activities; and the impact reported?
• How confident are we that our self-evaluation and reported impact provides our governing body with the insight that they need to plan for the long term and make significant resourcing decisions?
• How confident are we that our self-evaluation offers the governing body an honest assessment of our capacity to meet formal accountability requirements (for instance, regulatory or contractual obligations)?
• Are there opportunities to engage with the governing body on how we might present our self-evaluation in ways that are more useful to them, to support strategic decision-making, planning and oversight?