Monitoring, evaluating and learning lessons
Major investigation and public protection — Authorised Professional Practice
Summary
This section outlines the importance of comprehensive multi-agency performance measurement processes in the context of child abuse investigations. Such processes are essential to accurately identify, record, link, and analyze information related to child concerns and abuse. It emphasizes the need for oversight to determine both good and poor performance within child protection efforts and to pinpoint service gaps. Furthermore, it describes the performance management framework that helps in recognizing good practices and addressing poor performance through established accountabilities. Specific attention is placed on differentiating crimes against children from those against adults to facilitate better monitoring and analysis of performance.
Key principles
- 1The significance of multi-agency performance measurement for child protection.
- 2Managers must be accountable for child abuse investigation performance.
- 3Performance should focus on outcomes rather than just quantitative data.
- 4Services must ensure increased safety for children as a result of police interventions.
Defined terms
- Performance management framework
- A structure for ownership and accountability regarding the performance of child abuse investigations.
- Joint performance indicators
- Indicators developed to focus on outcomes rather than purely quantitative data.
Full guidance
Responding to public protection and major investigation issues, for example, child abuse, knife crime and sexual offences
This page is from APP, the official source of professional practice for policing.
Comprehensive multi-agency performance measurement processes should be designed to fully and accurately identify, record, link and analyse information relating to concerns for children and child abuse. This allows good and poor performance and practice, and gaps in service provision to be identified. It also provides a structure for ownership and accountability. The ways in which good practice and performance are recognised and shared, and the mechanisms used to improve poor performance all fall within the performance management framework.
Performance in connection with child abuse investigations by specialists and other police staff should be an integral part of the overall performance management regime. Managers should be identified to take responsibility for performance of investigations into child abuse, which should be monitored and reviewed at force and divisional levels. To enable performance to be monitored, forces need to be able to distinguish between crimes committed against children and offences committed against adults.
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The local safeguarding children board should develop joint performance indicators which focus on outcomes rather than quantitative information. A performance regime should be developed in forces to address internal activity, outputs and outcomes from the police perspective. This should have both quantitative and qualitative indicators which focus on outcomes for children.
The ultimate measure of strategic performance should always be the quality of service that a child is receiving in terms of increased safety as a result of police and/or multi-agency intervention (otherwise known as safeguarding interventions).
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Read the full APP guidanceSource: College of Policing — Authorised Professional Practice · Crown copyright, licensed under Open Government Licence v3.0. Summary fetched 2026-06-27.