Literacy Basics - Community Literacy of Ontario

Step Four: Review and Adjust

We need to continuously improve and make adjustments to our goals and related activities, as we go. Whether you make any changes to your programming will depend on the current situation at your agency. It is not likely that agencies have extra money to start adding additional programs or to hire new staff. The key is to keep changes manageable … sometimes a small change can have a large impact. For example, a change in scheduling might increase attendance without increasing costs.

If you do not think the need you have identified is something your agency can ever implement, you could take your findings to the Literacy Services Planning table and see if some other group in the community could meet the need, or you could bring it to the broader community. That could even be the beginnings of a new partnership!

Remember that sometimes change takes time: by working together with your Literacy Services Planning Committee or with other agencies in your community, you may be able to fill gaps that have been identified or to address other needs.

It is important to remember that if you don't achieve the results you expected, it does not mean that the program is doing a bad job. Many factors, or causes, can influence what results are or are not achieved. That's why understanding “cause” is such an important step of the agency assessment process. You can use your findings to revise expectations or to take steps to lessen the influence of some or all of the contributing factors over which your agency has some control.

You can also use the findings from your data collection efforts to compare current results to those from previous years. This in turn demonstrates the effects of last year's program improvement efforts and can help you document what changes worked and what didn't.

Analyzing the results your agency is achieving this year can help in future program planning. For example, this year's achievements can be used to set next year's targets. Reviewing the improvements made in your agency this year could help determine where your efforts should be focused the following year. Simply put, the results will tell you what you have done so far, and you will use them to determine what should (or should not) be done differently in the future to improve your program.

The results of the agency assessment process probably won't be a surprise. When deciding where to focus your program improvement efforts, don't choose only those areas that you know will show you in your best light! Of course you want to highlight what you do well, but you also want to identify areas where you could make improvements.

Agency assessment is not about proving we are perfect. It's about discovering what works and what doesn't work in your agency. And it's about responding to your findings by allocating your resources so that your agency is the best that it can be. Assessment is an opportunity for growth and a way to improve your program. Ultimately, our reason for being is to deliver quality literacy programming: agency assessment can help us do that to the best of our abilities and within the resources available to us.

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