Variations to the Outcomes Star

In order to make the Outcomes Star widely available and free to download, Homeless Link and Triangle Consulting, the creators of the Outcomes Star have made it available under a version of the Creative Commons licence – this means that it can be down-loaded free of charge and may be used with service users without any payment being made.

Agencies sometimes want to make slight changes to the wording of the Outcomes Star or to change some of the scales. Whilst we understand the desire to customise the Star you the needs of individual services wide consultation and discussion on this issue has indicated that allowing this would not serve the wider needs of sector as a whole, for the following reasons:-

• The official version has been tested and re-tested many times within the sector to create a tool that is coherent and practical. Changes are often made without a full understanding of the issues that have been considered in ensuring the overall integrity of the tool and therefore undermine the quality of the tool
•  If there are number of different versions of the Outcomes Star for homelessness in circulation this undermines the credibility of the tool – particularly if some of the versions are of poor quality.
• When clients move to different projects it is confusing if different versions of the same tool are used.
•  One of the benefits of the Outcomes Star is that all users who use the Outcomes Star System contribute to the development of a national outcomes evidence base. If there are different versions in circulation then the outcomes measured on each version are not comparable and it is no longer possible to develop an evidence base.