Local Evaluation of Children's Services Learning from the Children's ...

20. Some evaluators involved children and young people as questionnairerespondents or participants in interviews and/or focus groups; many used‘participatory’ methods of engaging children and young people. A minority oflocal evaluators involved children more fully through evaluation design,participation in fieldwork, analysis of data and presenting findings. This wasseen as making the questions evaluators asked more relevant to children andyoung people and helping to generate richer evaluation data.21. In some cases the lack of resources available to evaluators, difficultiesestablishing representative samples of those accessing services and the lowpriority given by the partnership to this type of activity limited the waysevaluators were able to engage children and young people.How local evaluation supports Children’s Fund partnerships’ decision making22. Evaluators have each adopted a range of summative, formative, and forsome, dialogic approaches to engaging with partnerships reflecting theirmultiple roles at different stages in partnerships’ development. Evaluationmaterial is disseminated through reports, presentations and workshops,websites, and some evaluators attend partnership board meetings, subgroupsor other organisational structures. A number of evaluators emphasised theimportance of ongoing dialogue with strategic partners about theirdevelopment rather than simply providing summative evaluation outputs.23. The importance of adopting appropriate means of feeding back evaluationmessages to a range of stakeholders including strategic partners, serviceproviders and children, young people and their families who used Children’sFund services was recognised by some evaluators. Some produced ‘childfriendly’ versions of reports or disseminated findings at events that involvedchildren and young people. However, it would appear that few evaluatorsprioritised service users, including children and young people, as an importantaudience of evaluation findings.24. Many local evaluations developed approaches to raising the capacity ofChildren’s Fund projects to self-evaluate their work through means such asworking alongside project staff in developing appropriate self-evaluation‘tools’, or through providing training.Executive Summaryv