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

motivated rather that based on local evaluation. The introduction of the CentralGovernment stipulation in 2002 that 25% of programmes’ budgets are allocated tocrime prevention activities (CYPU and the Youth Justice Board, 2002), for example,created significant tensions between Central Government priorities and the abilitiesof partnerships to determine their own programmes (Morris & Spicer 2003; Mason, etal., 2005).Partnerships also experience considerable change locally as mainstream health andsocial care agencies embrace a number of alternative and sometimes divergingagendas. Reflecting this context, as the ongoing work of the National Evaluationsuggests, Children’s Fund partnerships have sometimes struggled to establish theiragendas (for example, NECF, 2004b & c). Indeed, a small number of local Children’sFund evaluators indicated that evaluation was to an extent being driven by shiftingmainstreaming agendas in which partnerships are under pressure to use evaluationto both demonstrate what Children’s Fund projects are achieving to mainstreamagencies and to demonstrate the effectiveness of new practices promoted by theinitiative. The implications of this were described by a Wave One local evaluator:… they had their own agenda and that was to do with the migration intochildren’s trust and the emergence of integrated services; I just saw thatagenda kind of looming large… I think by the end of my time of evaluation withthe Children’s Fund I had a sense that the Children’s Fund were really comingup against that limit… things becoming much more top down and much lessbottom up. It was almost as though the Children’s Fund had done its job; it hadcreated some good and interesting work… and some projects were being kindof cherry picked for mainstreaming; the others were simply being let go to thewall.Some evaluators indicated that they experienced difficulties controlling howevaluation outputs would be disseminated, which groups would receive themessages, and how outputs would be used. The evaluator of a Wave Onepartnership highlighted the ways the messages contained within evaluation outputshad to be carefully poised in terms of reporting on negative aspects of partnerships’work; indeed, senior figures within the partnership had sought to exercise controlover the distribution of evaluation material:… it’s a little bit sad that it’s so politically driven now, and it is, and reports havebeen written very, very sensitively. I don’t know whether you noticed that, butthey have been written very sensitively. And we have been a bit pressuredabout where the reports go and… well I haven’t but powers above have, wherethey go, and if they’re in the public domain.42Chapter 3