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

Independent, balanced accounts of partnerships’ activitiesRelatively few reports explicitly stated that a key principle of the evaluation was itsindependence. One report, for example, indicated that it offered an independent,outsider’s view and hence offered perspectives that practitioners may not have. Anumber of reports indicated that it was their intention to generate learning from boththe successes as well as the failures of a partnership and its projects, and to highlightboth intended and unintended consequences of partnerships’ work. Some reportsstated that they had adopted a ‘critical friend’ stance in their relations withpartnerships; that negative comments were seen as assisting partnerships toimprove practice rather than as a judgement of poor performance. For example, anevaluation report of a Wave One partnership states: ‘Negative comments, where theyare given, are intended to be constructive – in the spirit of the “critical friend”’. Manylocal evaluation reports included some criticism of the progress of programmes,offering explanations as to why progress had been slow, proposing possible solutionsto bring about future improvements. Where the role of critical friend appeared to workmost successfully was where local evaluators were sensitive to the complex policyenvironments programmes were operating within, and where key members of theChildren’s Fund programme were receptive to the benefits of critical appraisal andprepared to use those findings to bring about improvements.A number of evaluators described the potential problems of balancing the intention ofbeing responsive to the needs of partnerships, and maintaining their independence.An evaluator of a Wave Two partnership indicated that whilst she felt the evaluationwas in principle relatively independent: I think [there was] minimal input from thepartnership board as well, because then it gets very political and agenda-driven. AndI didn’t feel that phase two [project evaluation] was that way, there had been somedifficulties in managing this independence in practice in terms of providing messagesthat the partnership board required of the evaluation:… as an independent evaluator, it’s all great and well, wonderful words andeverything, but actually some people don’t understand that. They still think thatyou’re paid by the Children's Fund therefore you will find what they want. Andsometimes the partnership board think, well we pay for you, so you will findwhat we want you to find, in the way that we want you to find it right.Some reports also stressed the importance of evaluation work being open tochallenge or correction by partnerships, indeed, the stage at which an evaluationengages with a partnership is important in terms of how definitive findings areexpected to be. Some reports, particularly early and interim reports, for example,Chapter 1 15