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

Similarly an evaluator of a Wave Two partnership suggested:…because it’s almost like they know what they want to find, and they’re justusing the evaluation to get there. But they know exactly what they want to find;you know almost the conclusions. I could work the conclusion now, and I’veonly just started the evaluation, I’m only on week one of my phase threeevaluation.A related particular problem inhibiting partnerships’ abilities to absorb and act onevaluation material, noted by a local evaluator appears to stem from strategicstakeholders’ multiple priorities and their commitments to their own agencies andother partnerships in the locality meaning they tend to have insufficient time to act onevaluation findings in a climate of rapid change:… what they’ve said is, ‘we’d like to get more involved, but… we’ve got our dayjobs. This is just one partnership board that we’re on, we’re on three, we’re onten, we’re on eight. So we can’t input into it as much as we can’… So in termsof their learning, I think it’s quite minimal. But then having said that, because ofall the other things that are going on in the borough, that doesn’t mean that theydon’t know about them, or indeed that they don’t want to know about them.Evaluators’ accounts suggest, however, that partnerships may be able to respondmore fully to evaluation findings at different stages in their development. According toan evaluator of a Wave Two Children’s Fund partnership, the partnership was opento receiving lessons from the evaluation and act on them in its early stages: I thinkwhat also helped the evaluation was that the programme was at a phase where itwas open to suggestion. So it was kind of malleable, so if I said, we really need amore consistent referral process, or we really need the monitoring stats to beanalysed, it was being done. The same local evaluator noted how the partnershipbecame less open to criticism during the course of the evaluation as the localauthority began to move towards the integration of children’s services and children’strusts. Whereas at the inception of the evaluation the partnership was very open tochange, as the evaluation has progressed the resulting reports have to be writtenvery, very sensitively…we have been a bit pressured about where the reports goand…if they’re in the public domain.Perceptions of the value and credibility of local evaluationA further key issue influencing evaluators’ abilities to influence the decision making ofChildren’s Fund partnerships is that, in some cases, local evaluators experienced adegree of dissonance between their views on what represented legitimate evaluationmethods, and those of some partnership board members. As noted earlier, theChapter 3 43