The Council monitors and manages a suite of Corporate Performance Indicators

These spread across the whole council, to make sure that we will deliver our statutory duties and the priorities of the Corporate Plan.

We publish this quarterly known as the Bexley Status report.

How are indicators used to interpret data?

From the full list of indicators, a selection is highlighted with more detail. These are selected when they are unusually high or low, or if they are showing a sustained trend.

The Bexley Status report includes a page per indicator for these, which are known as exceptions. This brings together historical values as well as commentary to understand the full picture.

Guidance is available further down this page to help interpret this report. You can view the Bexley Status Report below.

Understanding Bexley’s Corporate Performance Indicators

This guide has been written by Bexley’s Performance Team. It is intended to be read by residents, members, and officers, and aims to explain how to understand Bexley’s performance indicators.

It’s intended to be read alongside the Bexley Status Report.

How do performance indicators work?

Each performance indicator tracks data over a monthly, quarterly, or yearly period.

Most performance indicators have a target (a numerical aim).

Each performance indicator has a unique code with a prefix for each department.

• ASCH - Adult Social Care & Health
• CS - Children’s Services
• FC - Finance & Corporate Services
• PL - Place

We turn the data we collect into graphs, and these graphs show us if there is a trend. The graphs at a simple level tell us if performance is improving, staying the same, or worsening.

But we want to be more precise, so we use Statistical Process Control (SPC) charts. These charts act like a control system and warn us if our data is out of normal range or is behaving unusually.

The quicker we can understand, the quicker we can get performance back on track.

We call these charts ‘SPC charts’ and an example is available to view.

It is an SPC chart for the percentage of adults with learning disabilities who live in their own homes or with their families.

The blue line is showing the actual values each month (we can see how this changes from month to month).

The red line is showing us the trend. It then becomes clear that performance has changed when the blue line remains consistently above or below the current red line.

The yellow lines are telling us what is considered ‘normal’. If the blue line goes outside the yellow lines, we are alerted to our performance being outside of normal and this triggers attention at a senior level. 

Getting into the data with Performance Dashboards

We produce scorecard dashboards that show a high-level overview of how all our performance indicators are performing. This scorecard tells us which indicators we manage, how often we collect the data, when the latest data was collected, and how well the indicator is performing against its target.

Getting into the data with ‘One-Pagers’

Sometimes a dashboard is not detailed enough for when you want to get into the data. We also produce ‘one-pagers’ that are a one-stop shop for each indicator, telling you everything you need to know.

In a one-pager you will find:

• detail on the purpose of the indicator (what it is aiming to achieve)
• SPC chart - Data going back a longer period of time, sometimes years
• bar graphs - showing the last 12 periods so period values can be added for detail
• a written explanation of the performance  from an analyst, from the officers who run the service, from the director, and from finance and risk officers