“We only call him the Exploding Boy now, of course; retrospectively. For most of last year he was known only as Ticking Boy.” That is the first line from a new short story by @nickparker from a collection that got a rave review in Saturday’s Guardian. It made me think about the bomb ticking away ready to blow up the ever-growing range of payment by results schemes (details here) being developed by different government departments. That bomb is the method chosen for measuring outcomes which, for Ministry of Justice schemes, are always about reoffending. I wrote recently about my concerns that the MoJ seems to have decided that the outcome measure should be “binary” – a simple yes/no indicator of whether someone commits a further offence. The alternative approach is to measure “frequency” – a reduction in the number of re-offences. I
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