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

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Chapter 3: How Local Evaluation Supports Children’s FundPartnerships’ Decision-MakingThis chapter reviews the ways local evaluations have engaged with Children’s Fundpartnerships in seeking to support their decision making. The chapter highlights therange of ways evaluators have disseminated findings to partnerships and to whichgroups of stakeholders. Some of the key ways evaluation findings are used bypartnerships are then explored and the factors facilitating and inhibiting the abilities ofevaluators to influence partnerships’ decision making are identified.3.1 Multiple Approaches to Disseminating Evaluation FindingsIndividual evaluators have adopted a range of summative, formative, and for some,dialogic approaches to engaging with partnerships, reflecting their multiple roles atdifferent stages in partnerships’ development. Hence, evaluators have disseminatedmaterial to partnerships through writing reports (including interim reports, full reports,reports that focus on particular themes and those that examine project impacts andgood practices). They have also provided material through presentations andworkshops to partnership stakeholders, distributing material on websites, andthrough periodic attendance at Children’s Fund partnership board meetings,subgroups and other organisational structures.A number of evaluations emphasised the importance of creating a dialogue withstrategic partners in terms of developing how they might take things forward ratherthan providing summative evaluation outputs, as an evaluator of a Wave Twopartnership suggested:I think there’s definitely a dialogue. I mean I think we… and it’s a supportiveone. We don’t just kind of give information and then leave it; it’s about workingwith the partnership trying to say, we will feed it back but then do a little miniworkshop to get them to do some thinking around it, and about what that meansfor them and their partners and things. So it’s much more of a supportive kind ofrole really.Many evaluations sought to combine different approaches to engaging withpartnerships. For example a Wave One evaluator described how their adoption of anaction research model of working led to the dissemination of formative andsummative findings through ongoing discussions with the partnership. It was hopedthat such conversations would encourage the partnership to reflect on practices andhence be developmental:We do say ‘this is what you’ve done’ but, obviously, part of what we’re doing ismaking recommendations around how they might develop in the future andChapter 3 35
then trying to encourage discussion around that. In that sense, it is kind of anaction research type model, where we are making recommendations and tryingto facilitate discussion around those recommendations, as well as saying ‘this iswhat you’ve done’, sort of reflecting back practice to them.Another Wave One evaluation stressed the importance of breaking down boundariesbetween evaluation and practice; effective evaluation should engage in apartnership’s organisational and practice development:… our approach is action research and what that basically means is thatinstead of in a sense doing a systematic evaluation analysis of each individualproject or anything like that… we pretty much collapse the boundaries betweenwhat we call evaluation, organisational development, organisational learning,you know, practice development and policy development. In a sense they allbecome part of a learning system.Multiple audiences for evaluation findingsMany evaluators also pointed to the importance of adopting appropriate means offeeding back messages from the evaluation to a range of Children’s Fundstakeholders including strategic partners, service providers and children, youngpeople and their families who used Children’s Fund services. Local evaluationreports tended not to comment on their intended audience, although theirpresentation suggests they are intended for members of Children’s Fund programmepartnership boards. However, a relatively small number of local evaluators have alsoproduced ‘child friendly’ versions of reports and some local evaluators have providedversions of their reports for managers and practitioners of specific Children’s Fundprojects.One evaluator suggested that events had been an effective way of highlighting someof the issues raised by evaluation to a wider constituency of stakeholders. Thepartnership had run a children’s event to highlight key evaluation issues relating toprojects at which project workers, children, young people and their families attended,together with members of the partnership board, representatives from the children’strust and other strategic managers from statutory agencies attended. Events drawingthose working at strategic and operational levels together were also highlighted asbeing potentially effective for disseminating messages in a Wave One partnership.Although initially sceptical about the potential for limited interest among invitedprofessionals, the evaluator commented on the value of encouraging first-handexperiences of children and young people’s skills and abilities in an informal setting.It was suggested that such events can begin to develop strategic thinking around36Chapter 3
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Page 46 and 47: A Wave Two evaluation report descri
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