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

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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
developed self-evaluation tools through a series of workshops during the lifetime ofthe evaluation which aimed to offer ongoing support to projects developing theirabilities to evaluate themselves. Self-evaluation agreements were drawn up forprojects who were required to report on aims, indicators and their methods ofpreference towards drawing on data already available and complementing this withdata elicited from surveys, interviews and observations. The development ofevaluation tools was also a feature of an evaluation of a Wave Two partnership; akey aim was described as being to: ‘examine the processes by which theManagement Team collect data and monitor progress… how can evaluation beembedded in the process?’.A Wave Two evaluation was able to support those at the operational level throughfocus group work following the analysis of a survey on self-evaluation toolsdistributed to all service providers. Other evaluators were commissioned specificallyto carry out this role, as is described by a Wave One evaluator: …they’vecommissioned us, purely on a consultancy basis to write an evaluation tool kit fortheir project; a self-evaluation tool kit.The emphasis on developing self-evaluation practices has varied according to theneeds of the partnerships and available resources. A Wave One evaluator describedhow an attempt to carry out this work had been squeezed out as time and financialconstraints had taken over proceedings. This has been a cause of some frustrationamongst evaluators who may have regarded this aspect of the research as crucial,for example those describing themselves as action researchers. Conversely a WaveOne partnership described how concerns over future resources had positively driventhe development of self-evaluation tools, as those at strategic level sought toencourage service providers to consider their place beyond the life of the Children’sFund:It’s partly about an increasing focus on the mainstreaming agenda and the needto get projects to the point where they are able to pursue other forms of funding,etc. beyond the Children's Fund and the feeling that sustainability was partlyabout being able to demonstrate that they were achieving key outcomes.3.2 Partnerships’ Use of Evaluation Evidence in Decision MakingYoung, et al. (2002) propose a framework to describe the range of waysorganisations draw on evaluation findings to support their decision making processesin practice (as distinct from the intended roles or orientations of evaluations38Chapter 3
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RESEARCHLocal Evaluation ofChildren
Page 4 and 5: When citing this report please show
Page 6 and 7: ContentsExecutive SummaryIIntroduct
Page 8 and 9: Local Evaluation of the Children’
Page 10 and 11: 10. Local evaluators highlighted th
Page 12 and 13: 20. Some evaluators involved childr
Page 14 and 15: successes of partnerships’ work (
Page 16: 38. Conditions reinforcing effectiv
Page 19 and 20: Children’s Fund initiative, namel
Page 21 and 22: engaging with policy makers, practi
Page 23 and 24: starting points and timetables of d
Page 25 and 26: 1. Process evaluation: critical ass
Page 27 and 28: time commitments and pressures amon
Page 29 and 30: tantamount to auditing when origina
Page 31 and 32: to a certain extent, because I was
Page 33 and 34: acknowledge that findings presented
Page 35 and 36: methods that were seen as being app
Page 38 and 39: Chapter 2: Methods Adopted by Child
Page 40 and 41: place. In one Wave One evaluation t
Page 42 and 43: provided by projects weakened the a
Page 44 and 45: confidently attribute any trends in
Page 46 and 47: A Wave Two evaluation report descri
Page 48 and 49: • Recruitment of the researcher:
Page 50 and 51: drawn on by evaluators include semi
Page 52 and 53: Chapter 3: How Local Evaluation Sup
Page 56 and 57: highlighted in Table 1). These incl
Page 58 and 59: of had an impact. So we used a case
Page 60 and 61: Similarly an evaluator of a Wave Tw
Page 62 and 63: Evaluators sometimes struggled to a
Page 64: 6. A number of factors inhibit eval
Page 67 and 68: A number of evaluations described h
Page 69 and 70: 4.2 Key Messages from Local Evaluat
Page 71 and 72: for staff, typically dedicated part
Page 73 and 74: Where partnership working was descr
Page 75 and 76: strategic changes in children’s s
Page 77 and 78: 9. Evaluators reported that some co
Page 79 and 80: The importance of providing finding
Page 81 and 82: National Evaluation of the Children
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