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

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• Providing sets of recommendations to partnerships• Evaluating projects to inform ongoingcommissioning/funding of projectsInforming themainstream• Evaluating the Children’s Fund is seen as providing anevidence base that informs mainstream developmentof preventative strategies and children and familiesservicesCapacity building/evaluation support• Supporting projects (alongside programmes’ centralteams) in relation to evaluation and monitoringrequirements through one-to-one visits with projects,evaluation seminars and developing evaluation‘toolkits’. Evaluators have adopted training roles andhave facilitated projects exchanging practices aroundmonitoring and evaluation• Supporting projects to seek ongoing resources;assisting in the development of action plansMeasuringimpacts/outcomes• Assessing the extent to which (selected) Children’sFund activities are successfully achieving the subobjectivesand overall strategic objective of theinitiative at various stages in a partnership’sdevelopment• Assessing the impacts of projects/activities onservices users (children and young people, parentsand carers)• Assessing whether Children’s Fund projects/activitiesare effectively reaching specified groups of serviceusers• Assessing the extent to which partnerships have madean impact on the development on local children andfamilies’ services/development of strategic plans• Evaluating projects to inform the prioritisation ofongoing fundingLocal evaluators have typically sought to divide their work, or at least their approach,in terms of a consideration of processes and/or impacts. Illustrating this point, theevaluation of a Wave Three partnership, for example, clarifies how their work wasdivided according to these areas:Chapter 1 7
1. Process evaluation: critical assessment of the processes used to deliver theFund, mainly prevention, partnership and participation, but also strategic plansand the commissioning and monitoring processes.2. Impact evaluation: critical assessment of the impact the processes have hadon the children and families who access Children’s Fund services. Specificallythe impact that government envisions in the Children Act 2004Some evaluations placed more emphasis on generating learning about processes,while others placed more emphasis on evaluating impacts. Hence, local evaluationstend to correspond with both the generating learning/informing organisations’development and performance management roles outlined in Table 1.Many evaluators appear, however, to have adopted different roles over the course oftheir work. In the early stages of partnerships’ development, evaluators tended tofocus on providing feedback on processes such as commissioning and partnershipworking, and in doing so adopted formative forms of engagement with partnerships inwhich they supported early strategic planning and the ongoing management anddevelopment of programmes. As partnerships became more established manyevaluations switched their focus to producing summative outputs in which theymeasured impacts/outcomes. They also focussed on aspects of programmes whichhad been successful in meeting targets and sought to more systematically identifyareas of work which would be appropriate to continue to fund or to promote formainstreaming.The majority of evaluators described the role of evaluating impacts and that ofgenerating information to inform ongoing development of partnerships asoverlapping; the former is expected to form an evidence base for partnershipdecision making, rather than simply a summative record of performance. Illustratingthis overlap, an evaluation report of a Wave Three partnership emphasises theanalysis of partnership and project performance, findings from which form anevidence-base that is intended to inform the programme and strategic developmentof mainstream agencies:The aim of this local evaluation is to provide the partnership and projects withan analysis of current performance, and to use this understanding to develop astrong evidence base to make changes and improvements to the programme,which can also feed into mainstream provision and strategic development.8Chapter 1
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 12 and 13: 20. Some evaluators involved childr
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Page 16: 38. Conditions reinforcing effectiv
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Page 21 and 22: engaging with policy makers, practi
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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
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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
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Page 58 and 59: of had an impact. So we used a case
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Page 62 and 63: Evaluators sometimes struggled to a
Page 64: 6. A number of factors inhibit eval
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strategic changes in children’s s
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9. Evaluators reported that some co
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The importance of providing finding
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National Evaluation of the Children
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