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

Chapter 1: Roles and Principles of Local Children’s FundEvaluationsThis chapter describes the roles adopted by local evaluations of Children’s Fundpartnerships and reflects on a number of key factors that have influenced the abilitiesof local evaluators to undertake their roles at different stages in partnerships’development. The chapter then explores the range of principles adopted by localevaluators that were seen as reinforcing the credibility and effectiveness of theirwork.1.1 Roles of Children’s Fund Local EvaluationsThe Children’s Fund Guidance clarifies that local programmes are expected to beinnovative and develop new practices and approaches to tackle social exclusion forchildren and young people (CYPU, 2001). The lessons from the Children’s Fundprogrammes are to be elicited and the ways in which projects and other Children’sFund activities contribute to achieving outcomes for children are to be understood.The document indicates that local evaluators have the role of gauging theperformance of Children’s Fund activities and projects; this was expected to supportpartnerships to make appropriate changes to their programmes:The key purpose of local evaluation is to allow partnerships and services tobetter understand how well they are performing and to act on emergingevidence by making relevant changes to their programme. This will also ensurethat the development of the partnership and services is evidence-based.(CYPU, 2001, p25)Furthermore, it is aimed that local evaluation will identify key lessons from practice toinform local policy on children’s services:Local evaluation is to be commissioned by the partnership to enable you tounderstand what works, how and why; to monitor progress against local andnational objectives and targets; and to feed in lessons to reconfigure servicesas a result of evaluation findings… the overall purpose (of local evaluation)should be to inform future policy in relation to the local context and theparticular needs and circumstances of the community. The local evaluationshould consider whether services provided by the partnership are reachingyoung people, children and families showing early signs of difficulty and whateffect if any the services are having on their lives.(CYPU, 2001, p7)In practice, local evaluators have interpreted the aims defined in the Guidance andapplied aspects of them as outlined in their reports. The Children’s Fund initiative hasallowed for partnerships to develop strategies and practices according to theirrelevance at the local level. Reflecting this, local programmes have sought to definethe specific roles evaluators take on to correspond with programmes’ priorities,Chapter 1 5