Community Appraisal Process

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Community Appraisal Process

Community Appraisals are basically questionnaires designed by local people (usually in the form of parishes) to find out what the opinions of local people are to the various problems that the local community faces. The process has been used on such a scale that it has been standardised to a greater extent. This process involves the five distinct stages listed below and can take a number of months to complete.

Typical subjects that might be covered are:

Transport problems: eg lack of public transport, cars travelling too fast, state of the roads, accident danger spots.

Housing problems: eg too much development, wrong materials being used, local people moving away.

Education problems: eg need for local nursery, local adult education opportunities wanted.

Communication problems: eg need for a newsletter, parish council meetings unattended.

Facilities: eg need a new village hall, sports facilities inadequate, school facilities opened up to public.

Crime & safety: eg neighbourhood watch, "bobbies on the beat".

One-off projects: eg millennium celebration project ideas.

Typical Process of A Community Appraisal

Stage 1

The parish council decides it would like to know what its people want in the future and contacts the Community Council of Devon (CCD) who send out a representative to the next parish council meeting.

The parish council then appoint a separate steering group to follow the process through. At this point the funding of the project will be discussed with the parish being asked to contribute towards the project and extra funding being available depending on the location of the parish. Examples of sources of funding in the past have been the European 5b fund, the various District Councils, the South & West Devon Health Authority, Devon County Council, Rural Action etc.

The steering group, with continued support from the CCD, then produce a questionnaire. This questionnaire is sent to Corporate Information Services (CIS) at County Hall in Exeter who do some final tidying up and send the result to Devon Design & Print (DDP) (Devon County Council's in-house print unit) for printing. Once printed the questionnaires are returned to the appraisal steering group.

Stage 2

The Steering Group arrange for the questionnaires to be delivered to every household in their parish. The questionnaires are designed to be answered by up to 6 people in a household and every one above the age of 10 are invited to complete the form. After a week or so the completed questionnaires are collected up again.

Stage 3

The questionnaires return to CIS to be entered into a computer and analysed (using SPSS software). The full results are passed on to CCD who pick out the significant points before returning them to the Parish Steering Group.

Stage 4

The Steering Group set about producing a report which will highlight all the main points revealed in the questionnaire and present some action plan recommendations and targets on how to proceed to solve them. When the report has been completed it is returned to CIS for final tidying up before being printed by DDP.

Stage 5

After printing, the completed report will be returned to the parish to be distributed to the same households that completed the original questionnaire. The Steering Group will quite often present the report to an open parish meeting.

The results can be used for a variety of purposes including:

being used in funding applications for specific projects.

being used to affect the local planning application process.

being used to help plan the parish council’s future projects for a number of years to come.

being used to lobby other authorities.

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Page last updated on: 12 January 2000
This Information was provided by Corporate Information Services
Send any comments, enquiries, etc. to DRIS@devon.gov.uk