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

initiative such as the Children’s Fund, as the evaluation report states: ‘… a number ofissues have been raised about the suitability of many of these indicators whenmeasuring a relatively short-term, preventive programme such as the X’s Children’sFund’.The evaluation assessed the impacts of two Children’s Fund-supported projects thatinvolved one-to-one work with specific pupils that were aimed to improve schoolattendance and attainment: the first, a project that focused on pupil attendance,aimed to ‘(build) supportive relationships with all those involved with individual pupilswho are showing poor attendance’. The second, a volunteer reading project, wasdescribed as providing ‘extra educational support for many children who have fallenbelow the expected reading age for their school year’. Although these projects weretargeted within a number of schools, the former fourteen, the latter sixty, theevaluators experienced a number of difficulties in attempting to apply quantitativemeasures when assessing their impact, particularly when applied to the readingproject. As they explain: ‘measuring the impact of this kind of work…is problematic,as it tends to be informal, non-curriculum based and thus difficult to quantify’.The evaluation encountered a number of difficulties in using quantitative data sets(school attendance and unauthorised absence and performance at Key Stages 2 and3) to measure outcomes of Children’s Fund activity locally. Local and national schoolattendance figures were compared; improvements between 2001 and 2003 werehigher locally than the national average. They were cautious, however, in suggestingthat this could be attributed to the local Children’s Fund projects as they also foundthat attainment levels remained at less than the national average during this time.The evaluation therefore acknowledges the difficulties with attributing improvementsto the work of X Children’s Fund despite the high number of schools that weretargeted and therefore focuses on examples of specific cohorts of pupils in specificschools potentially benefiting from X Children’s Fund.Using this comparison the evaluation finds ‘clear improvements’ in attendance duringthe time the project has been running. However, again caution is advised asdiscrepancies between ‘authorised’ and ‘unauthorised’ absences makes for a morecomplicated picture – when considered separately either one of these had actuallyincreased in some schools during this period. This cautionary note compounds thepersistent issue of attribution which the evaluators feel is not solved by focusing onindividual schools: ‘since these statistics are at school level…it is difficult to26Chapter 2