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

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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
25. A number of local evaluation reports identified where their recommendationshave been developed into tangible changes in the partnership. Others wereuncertain about how evaluation material had or would influence thepartnership. Evaluations appear to be offering material to partnerships to beused instrumentally, that is, through changing their practices and/or decidingwhich projects to re-commission. Local evaluation also appears to be usedconceptually in terms of expanding partnerships’ understandings relating toprevention, partnership working and participation (that is an enlightenmentmodel of the relationship between evaluation and decision making).26. Many programme managers participating in the NECF programme managers’questionnaire survey indicated that local evaluation helped identifysuccessful/less successful projects (51%) and how they worked well/less well(56%). 43% indicated local evaluation had helped decision-making aboutcontinuing funding projects and promoting projects for mainstreaming (39%).43% of programme managers indicated that local evaluation had helped thepartnership reflect on strategic practices and how to improve them. 47% ofprogramme managers indicated that local evaluation had helped to developthe partnership’s thinking about prevention, partnership working andprevention or as a means of helping to promote changes in practices andcultures among mainstream agencies (39%). Only 27% of programmemanagers suggested that local evaluation had been of limited value to thepartnership.27. Evaluators suggested that they could have more influence on partnerships byproviding findings that are relevant, useful, timely, accessible to a range ofstakeholders, and provide realistic recommendations. The importance ofengendering a relationship in which the partnership recognises the value ofevaluation and is open to both positive and more critical feedback was alsonoted.28. A number of factors inhibit evaluators’ influence on partnerships’ decisionmaking. Pressures from ongoing change nationally and within local authorityareas as mainstream agencies embrace a number of alternative, andsometimes, diverging agendas means that local Children’s Fund evaluationmay get drawn on selectively to legitimise decisions or to demonstrate theviExecutive Summary
Page 1 and 2: RESEARCHLocal Evaluation ofChildren
Page 4 and 5: When citing this report please show
Page 6 and 7: ContentsExecutive SummaryIIntroduct
Page 8 and 9: Local Evaluation of the Children’
Page 10 and 11: 10. Local evaluators highlighted th
Page 14 and 15: successes of partnerships’ work (
Page 16: 38. Conditions reinforcing effectiv
Page 19 and 20: Children’s Fund initiative, namel
Page 21 and 22: engaging with policy makers, practi
Page 23 and 24: starting points and timetables of d
Page 25 and 26: 1. Process evaluation: critical ass
Page 27 and 28: time commitments and pressures amon
Page 29 and 30: tantamount to auditing when origina
Page 31 and 32: to a certain extent, because I was
Page 33 and 34: acknowledge that findings presented
Page 35 and 36: methods that were seen as being app
Page 38 and 39: Chapter 2: Methods Adopted by Child
Page 40 and 41: place. In one Wave One evaluation t
Page 42 and 43: provided by projects weakened the a
Page 44 and 45: confidently attribute any trends in
Page 46 and 47: A Wave Two evaluation report descri
Page 48 and 49: • Recruitment of the researcher:
Page 50 and 51: drawn on by evaluators include semi
Page 52 and 53: Chapter 3: How Local Evaluation Sup
Page 54 and 55: participation and work towards the
Page 56 and 57: highlighted in Table 1). These incl
Page 58 and 59: of had an impact. So we used a case
Page 60 and 61: Similarly an evaluator of a Wave Tw
Page 62 and 63:
Evaluators sometimes struggled to a
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6. A number of factors inhibit eval
Page 67 and 68:
A number of evaluations described h
Page 69 and 70:
4.2 Key Messages from Local Evaluat
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for staff, typically dedicated part
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Where partnership working was descr
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strategic changes in children’s s
Page 77 and 78:
9. Evaluators reported that some co
Page 79 and 80:
The importance of providing finding
Page 81 and 82:
National Evaluation of the Children
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