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

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