Performance Standards
This is a joint project between the Ministry of Justice and Restorative Justice Aotearoa.
The starting point was the standards put in place for contracting between MOJ and the 4 Pilot Court Provider Groups established in 2001. Since then there has been considerable review and development involving a huge amount of work and input by Members of RJA along the way.
After feedback on the version of these standards published at the RJ Practitioner’s Conference in 2007, agreement was reached between RJA and MoJ that RJA would lead a project to refine the standards document from a practitioner perspective.
From April 2009, RJA contracted Delaraine Armstrong (providing input from a tikanga maori perspective) and John Kavanagh (providing input from an organisational standards perspective) who worked together with a subject matter experts group (comprised of Mariameno Kapa Kingi – Ngati Hine Health Trust, Linda Gaskin – Project Turnaround Timaru, Liz Flaherty – Tauranga Moana RJ Trust, Winifred Murray – St Lukes Community Trust, Mike Hinton – Nga Whare Waatea and Fiona Landon – Restorative Justice Services Auckland) to produce the RJA Trial Standards Document.
Members have been requested to test drive these standards to ensure they work in the way that is intended then give us feedback. The standards have been written in a way that ensures that compliance can be achieved by a range of evidence. We expect that many groups will comply with all that is required already.
The long term objective is that we end up with a set of RJ Provider Standards that are accurate, relevant, achievable and ensure good RJ. We want these to be sufficiently versatile that they can be part of the measure used to ensure MoJ contract compliance but can also stand alone outside MoJ requirements and simply form the foundation for good RJ.
RJA is working on a Full Membership standards, and these standards are anticipated to be a component of that quality assurance process. This quality assurance standard will give us a foundation as an organisation for ensuring good, professional and safe practice.
