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

participation and work towards the reengagement between the strategic andoperational aspects of Children’s Fund activity:… we planned a huge fun day in effect, an hour of which was taken up with usdoing all sorts of work; asking questions and so on. Now my interpretation ofthat is that professionals would see the hour as being the bit that they should beat which they may or may not get to and the rest of it as being not work. Butactually those people that were there for the day came away thinking that they’dgot something quite special out of the process because they’d seen how thechildren had inter-acted across the whole day. They’d learnt something aboutchildren’s participation across the whole day and actually for some I think it wasan interesting process of re-engaging with children. I mean clearly some hadtheir own children and so on and others have gone in their own personal livestheir own children are grown up and so on. But my sense is that there is aseparation sometimes between children’s policy-makers and children.It would appear however that few evaluators prioritised service users, includingchildren and young people, as an important audience of evaluation findings. Forexample, one evaluator described how it was initially difficult to find the mostappropriate ways of engaging parents in evaluation feedback:[I asked] I just want to know what you think about it. Is that something that youcan relate to or…? Any of the recommendations are they completely out of thewater that you just think, what on earth are you talking about; don’t know whatthat’s about? And I think to be honest with you, people were quite afraid of theevaluation to begin with, like they couldn’t challenge it, or they couldn’t questionit. Or they couldn’t say, well what do you mean by that, what on earth does thatmean?Building partnerships’ capacities to undertake evaluationIn addition to effectively communicating findings to partnership stakeholders, manylocal evaluations described a key focus of their work as developing approaches toraising the capacity of Children’s Fund projects to self-evaluate their work. Someevaluators regarded this as central to the evaluation process, whether this wasthrough evaluators working alongside project staff in developing appropriate selfevaluation‘tools’ during the life of the evaluation, or through more formal trainingwithin workshops involving members of the partnership. For example, one evaluationsupported Children’s Fund projects to identify, summarise and record their successesand failures and future strategies. Another evaluator was specifically involved inbuilding the capacity of children and young people to evaluate Children’s Fundservices.For some evaluations developing self-evaluation tools contributed to a number ofother dissemination and supportive activities. A Wave One evaluator, for example,Chapter 3 37