Community Legal Services Program

Service Standards Manual

for the

Community Legal Services Program

Prepared by Community Link Australia

December 2000

Revised by Attorney-General’s Department

June 2001

Contents

Preface......

Introduction......

Why Service Standards?......

Complementing Aspirational Quality......

How the Standards were formulated......

Compliance with the Standards......

Monitoring by service providers......

Preparing for Audit......

Meeting a Standard......

How compliance will be rated......

The Audit Report......

The State/Territory Program Manager Report......

Working to achieve compliance......

Some thoughts about process…......

Some thoughts about procedures…......

Designing Procedures......

The Standards…......

a. Standard for Information and Referral......

b. Standard for Provision of Advice......

c. Standard for Casework......

d. Standard for Community Legal Education......

e. Standard for Law Reform and Legal Policy......

f. Standard for Accessibility......

g. Standard for Organisational Management......

h. Standard for the Management of Information and Data......

i. Standard for Assessing Client Satisfaction and Managing Complaints......

Attachment 1 Audit Report Pro Forma......

Preface

Over the years, community legal service providers have become a well established and highly valued part of Australia’s social infrastructure, operating across the country to deliver a wide range of generalist and specialist legal services.

The community legal services sector plays a vital role in assisting disadvantaged people to access and deal with the legal system. In addition, community legal service providers occupy a unique position in law reform in Australia, pursuing a range of reform and public interest issues on behalf of disadvantaged people and the community at large.

The history and current capacity of community legal centres have much to do with the contributions of hundreds of professional and other people who have given of their time and skills, on a voluntary basis, for many years.

Services are delivered by staff and volunteers, under the guidance of voluntary management committees in community legal service providers across the country. They reflect broad diversity in size, geographical spread, areas of legal expertise and types of services provided.

Many community legal service providers receive financial support under the Commonwealth Community Legal Services Program (CCLSP), which is administered by the Legal Assistance Branch within the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department. The CCLSP forms part of the Commonwealth’s broader commitment to achieving equitable and improved access to legal services in the community.

At an administrative level, CCLSP management is undertaken by State-level program managers in Legal Aid Commissions in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, and Tasmania on behalf of the Commonwealth. In South Australia, the State-level program manager is the State Attorney-General’s Department which administers the program on the Commonwealth’s behalf. In the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory, the Commonwealth administers the Program directly.

The development of the Community Legal Service Standards, as set out in this document, has occurred following discussions between practitioners, service managers and volunteers, together with the Commonwealth Attorney-General's Department, State/Territory managers, and the consultants, Community Link Australia. All these stakeholders support the principle that people using community legal services are entitled to expect a legal service which reflects the unique relationship between lawyer and client.

In summary this relates to the way -

the client problem is received, assessed, accepted or referred
client confidentiality is established and protected
the legal issues are identified and dealt with
any additional specialist expertise is obtained
the matter is managed
information is sought from, and provided to, clients
client files are established and maintained
court requirements, including filing, are explained to the client and carried out

These imperatives apply no matter where a community organisation operates, and they should apply whether one is a volunteer or employed staff member.

The Service Standards have been formulated to reflect the foundations of quality community legal service provision. The existence of the Standards will enhance the confidence that key stakeholders have in community legal service provision, whether those stakeholders be people using services, the governments that fund services, or the community as a whole.

Introduction

Welcome to the Community Legal Services Standards Manual.

The Manual marks a new phase in a broad, ongoing quality strategy for community legal services, a strategy under which service providers and governments work together to maintain and improve legal services for people across Australia.

The Introduction covers three perspectives on the Service Standards, namely

why Service Standards are important
how Service Standards compliment ‘aspirational quality’
what Service Standards are

Why Service Standards?

Service Standards are important to community legal services delivery because quality itself is important – that is, the quality of the experience that people have in looking for assistance with their legal problems.

The quality of a service is about all of the things that impact upon the experience of the client - anything from the listening skills of the person working at reception, to the privacy and comfort of the waiting area.

Service Standards address an important part (though not the whole) of what is needed to achieve a quality service. Service Standards are limited to those fundamental aspects of service delivery which can be expressed in terms of a defined standard.

The policy rationale for Service Standards for community legal service providers is threefold.

Standards are designed to provide

an assurance to the Department and State/Territory program managers that community legal service provision across Australia is of a certain level of quality. Government interest arises from its role as the purchaser of services on behalf of clients, and its accountability (together with service providers) to the community for public funds
an assurance to community legal service providers themselves that all providers will meet reasonable operating standards in order to ‘hold themselves out’ as community legal service providers
an assurance to clients about the quality of services provided.

The Service Standards may be thought of as foundational to quality. The Standards establish the essential, qualitative ingredients of community legal service provision. The absence of any ‘essential ingredients’ in any given instance of service would lead to a conclusion of substandard service delivery. In many ways, compliance with the Service Standards will become the ‘standard of entry’ to the sector.

Complementing Aspirational Quality

Compliance with foundational standards offers confidence regarding a 'capacity to operate'; but it does not offer 'true quality' or a framework for ‘best practice’. The phrase 'true quality' reflects the higher tier of aspirational quality, and ‘best practice’ is a phrase associated with demonstrating specific instances of ‘true quality’.

Some important distinctions between foundational standards and ‘true’ or aspirational quality are worthy of note -

‘true quality', or the aspirational tier of quality is shaped by an organisation’s culture, whereas foundational standards are shaped in a development process within a sector, such as with the process between community legal service providers and the Commonwealth and State government departments in developing the Community Legal Service Standards

‘true quality’ cannot be regulated or imposed from outside of an organisation. What happens in the interaction between a worker or practitioner and a client in a consulting room is mostly influenced by the range of values, attitudes, and aspirations of the worker or practitioner, rather than any mandated, externally audited set of standards which may be developed

‘true quality’ can only be voluntarily embraced by an organisation, whereas compliance with foundational standards can be ‘mandated’.

Noting all of this, aspirational quality does not exist in isolation from the core foundational standards. The two views are complementary in a quality strategy.

For many service providers, interests in quality will be less about minimum standards and more about quality improvement in the more profound, ‘aspirational’ sense. Those organisations will find that the Service Standards are fully complimentary to any aspirational quality improvement that they wish to pursue.

How the Standards were formulated

The Community Legal Service Standards were developed as part of the Service Standards and Performance Indicators (SSPI) Project over a period from June 1999 to December 2000.

The process of development included

Investigation of broader approaches to quality improvement relevant to community legal services
Consultations with the field, including two widespread consultations and two fora attended by field and government representatives
A trial of the audit process to be used to ensure compliance with the Standards, and further reflections on the Standards themselves
Final implementation of the Standards as part of the Service Agreements between providers and the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department and State/Territory program managers

The development process was facilitated by a company called Community Link Australia, which was contracted for that purpose by the Commonwealth Government. A Consultative Committee of field and government representatives provided ongoing input to the process.

A strong orientation in the development of the Service Standards was to reflect the joint thinking of the field, the Department and State-level program managers about realistically achievable ‘minimum standards’ for community legal services. In other words, most of the Standards reflect current thinking and practice.

Compliance with the Standards

As a community legal service provider, you are required under the service agreement to maintain compliance with the Service Standards.

To meet the policy agenda with the necessary public credibility, verification of the compliance of service providers with the Service Standards is necessary.

Following consultation under the Service Standards and Performance Indicators (SSPI) Program, it has been agreed that compliance with the Standards will be established in three ways -

Annual Self Audits – these audits will be conducted internally by your organisation and will need to be signed off by the Chairperson on your management committee and an audit report provided to your State/Territory Program Manager.

Triennial Audit - State/Territory Program Managers will routinely oversee one audit once in the life of a three year funding contract.
Should an annual audit report indicate that your organisation has not fully met compliance with the set of service standards, the State/Territory Program Manager will monitor your progress towards achieving full compliance and may oversee subsequent audit processes until such time as full compliance is achieved.

Monitoring by service providers

In addition to the annual self and triennial audit processes, organisations themselves will internally monitor compliance, as a matter of course.

In particular, in the period leading to a an annual audit you will find it useful to undertake a brief self audit of compliance with the Service Standards. An intermittent self audit will keep you in touch with how you have dealt with the requirements of the Standards, and where necessary, will provide you with some ideas for how you can improve what you are doing.

Of course, in 2001-02, your self-audits will be important to establish your initial position under the Service Standards. You will use an initial self-audit to plan any work you want to have done in time for the commencement of mandatory compliance on 1 July 2002. This is discussed in the section of the Manual entitled Working to Achieve Compliance.

Preparing for Audit

In the weeks prior to the audit process occurring, you will want to ensure that things are organised. You can expect that the process will take between two and three hours.

On the day that an audit process is due to occur, you will want to ensure that –

An auditor or audit team is available within your organisation and is prepared for the audit process
A room is available where the auditor or audit team can work
All of the documentation you have to offer in support of your compliance with the Service Standards is assembled or readily available
Staff and interested volunteers are available to speak to the audit team
The coordinator or other suitable person is available to resource the audit process as required

The better organised you are, the more quickly and smoothly the process will go.

Meeting a Standard

The idea of the audit process is to show that your organisation is meeting the Service Standards. In other words, you use the audit process to show that the necessary Service Standards attributes are in place and that people are using the necessary procedures and are aware of them.

There are nine Service Standards that are mandatory. In formal terms, a Service Standard will be met when two aspects are fulfilled:

The attributes for a Standard are observable and understandable by people undertaking the audit, and specifically that required procedures:

–are documented

–have a title (this just means a heading that helps to identify the relevant procedure or part of a procedure)

–include tasks for which someone or some people are responsible (including any delegated responsibility from the management committee, co-ordinator or supervising worker)

–include timeframes (when this has to be done) and internal checks or controls as necessary (who will check it/supervise or who will make the decision before something else is done), and

People in the organisation are aware of procedures referred to in the attributes

This means that people doing audits will want to see the procedures and other things you have done to make the attributes of each Standards observable. A pro forma of the audit report is shown in Attachment 1.

Clearly, there are many ways of addressing the attributes, and organisations will be developing procedures that are appropriate to their size and circumstances. There is no expectation that compliance in one organisation will look exactly the same as compliance in another organisation.

In terms of staff awareness of the procedures, people undertaking audits will want to carry out brief interactions with some staff and, where relevant, interested volunteers, to gauge the level of awareness of the procedures. This interaction can occur in the context of some brief discussions or with the use of a simple survey process.

In process terms, checking staff awareness will involve either

Brief interviews, one-to-one, with a cross section of staff, or
A meeting with a cross section of staff as a group.

The interviews or meetings will involve discussions with staff as to what they do in relation to certain tasks or scenarios raised by the auditor, which will be relevant to the documentation that the auditor has already seen.

The process will be directed to areas in which people are involved. For instance, it will be necessary to ask people involved in giving advice about how they follow procedures designed by the organisation around the Standard for Advice, but it may not be relevant to ask the community education workers who are not involved in this activity.

On the basis of the contact with staff (and volunteers where necessary), the auditor will assess whether the awareness of procedures is adequate to enable people to put them into effect. This does not mean that staff require a capacity to memorise all the procedures. It does mean that there is sufficient awareness of the way a process is designed to indicate that the procedures are in use in a regular way.

How compliance will be rated

People undertaking audits will have three options for rating your organisation’s compliance with each of the Service Standards.

Compliance for each Standard

Each Standard can be –

1.Fully met

This means that all required attributes of the Standard are observable by the auditors, and specifically that:

a.All required procedures are in place that

–are documented (in written or electronic format)

–have a title (a heading that helps to identify the relevant procedure or paragraph of a procedure)

–include tasks for which someone or some people are responsible

–include timeframes and internal checks or controls as necessary, and

b. Relevant people in the organisation are aware of procedures referred to in the attributes.

2.Met with the completion of work under way

This means that one or more required attributes of the Standard are partly observable by the auditors, and in the opinion of the auditors work will lead to the attributes becoming fully observable because:

a. Work that will make them fully observable is under way (progress can be shown by work done, draft procedures, minutes of meetings etc); and

b. The service provider has the capacity and a plan to complete the work (some kind of work plan or minutes of meetings showing who is undertaking the tasks and when they will be done); and

c. Relevant people in the organisation are aware of work under way.

3.Not met

This means that one or more of the required attributes of the Standard are not observable by the auditors and any work under way appears unplanned, and it is unclear what the work will deliver. If some attributes are observable, and not others, and there is not sufficient evidence of work under way, the Standard is ‘Not met’.

The Audit Report

The audit report will be a written record of the views of the people who carried out the assessment of an organisation’s level of compliance with the Service Standards. The audit report is in two parts, the Audit Report Summary and the Service Standards Detailed Report.

The Report Summary will contain –

The name of the community legal service provider
The contact officer responsible for the audit, and the date on which it took place
A rating of the level of compliance of the service provider for each Standard in the categories

–Fully met