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

Similarly, a Wave One partnership report highlights that evaluation aims to identifywhat works and how, how these relate to targets, and that findings are expected toinform decision making beyond the Children’s Fund initiative:The local evaluator is the ‘critical friend’ of the Children’s Fund programme,providing the local agencies with information about what works, what actualimpact the projects have had, and how this impact came about. Monitoring theprogress towards national as well as local objectives and targets is an importantaspect of local evaluation. The evaluator is required to focus on the processes,outputs and short term outcomes of Children’s Fund services and should beable to influence the short term direction and thrust of local services, almost inan action research model.Two further roles were apparent in local evaluators’ work: firstly, some evaluationshave tended to adopt consultant/technician/analyst roles (see Table 1) by which theyhave carried out specific tasks defined by partnerships such as gathering andanalysing baseline data at some stages in the evaluation. These activities includemapping of activities introduced by a partnership or more broadly carrying outbaseline surveys of existing services relevant to children and young people in a LocalAuthority area, or the mapping of socioeconomic contexts that have informed earlydecisions on commissioning. These tasks indicate that some evaluators hadrelatively limited scope to define their own methods, interpret data and evaluatepartnerships’ activities. Secondly, a number of local evaluations have adoptedcapacity building roles (often also referred to as empowerment evaluation) in whichthey have sought to support partnership stakeholders, frequently project officers, toundertake evaluation activities themselves. The latter is detailed more fully inChapter 2 of this report.It is therefore evident that evaluations have often adopted multiple roles that changein emphasis over time, including varying degrees of capacity-building. Someevaluators also referred to changes stemming from policy developments at nationaland local levels that have influenced their abilities to undertake different roleseffectively; these are described below.1.2 Factors Influencing the Evaluation ProcessRelations with stakeholdersLocal evaluators highlighted a number of engagement and methodological problemsthey encountered. Local evaluators described a broad problem of engaging withservice users through projects, and of ‘research fatigue’ from stakeholder groups withresponses being fewer than anticipated. Some reports pointed to the problems ofChapter 1 9