Turnaways

Knowing how many people you turn away from your Centre helps you understand the extent of legal need in the community that you cannot meet. This includes clients you provide some assistance to, such as legal advice, but you cannot meet all their legal needs, such as their need for representation. Having turnaway data also helps us advocate for more funding at a state and commonwealth level.

On the first of July we will be updating the Reason for referral or refusal categories in CLASS to cover all the different reasons for referral. Many of the values are the same. You will still be able to run reports on services that have previous values selected, but these previous values cannot be selected after July 1. Here is a list of the new and old values.

Thanks very much to those of you who provided feedback on the draft that we published in the March issue of CLASS News.

We have incorporated your suggestions and a final version is available here.

The main changes are:

• Adding a section at the beginning explaining why turnaways are important
• Clarification that turnaways are counting services not people
• Changing the Reason for referral to Reason for referral or refusal (to accommodate situations where no referral can be made)
• Breaking down Centre does not offer service or Centre does not have capacity to deliver service into discrete and ongoing services, to allow capture of data about lack of ongoing services
• Adding Person is banned or otherwise excluded
• Adding Outside other eligibility guidelines