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

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Evaluators sometimes struggled to address the multiple requirements of theevaluation with the timing of their engagement and the expectations of when theywould feedback. It was recognised, for example, that early engagement andfeedback might assist programmes to plan their development on an informed basis.However, this would limit that evaluation’s ability to present what were seen asdefinitive conclusions. Conversely, later evaluation engagement/feedback were seenas providing a greater degree of confidence in findings, but as a retrospective viewthat may be less helpful in informing a partnership about future directions.Other evaluators pointed to the importance of maintaining ongoing dialogue withprogramme managers and members of the programme team in order to ensure thatevaluation outputs are useful, accessibly presented and that they are realistic aboutwhat the evaluation is able to produce. For example, one evaluator pointed to theproblems of not effectively managing the expectations of the partnership:… the previous director didn’t do enough in the way of dialogue with us…whathappened was that we were producing types of report and working on focuseswhich he didn’t particularly want or didn’t find particularly useful…whathappened in the end though was that the… clearly regretted the fact that he’dcome in half way through and hadn’t had a hands on approach because he feltvery strongly that for local evaluation to work it had to be a sort of collaborativething and in fact at times I feel he wants to be slightly too hands on for it to becalled evaluation to be honest.Another evaluator described a number of problems that limited the impact that theevaluation had on the work of the partnership. Such problems included limited clarityamong stakeholders about the purposes of evaluation, that the local evaluation hadproduced outputs that were too ‘academic’ in style and that it had not been able toproduce ‘hard’ data demonstrating outcomes which the programme required:… we began to get this sort of critical feedback about how you know the wholething was too academic and too weighty and it wasn’t telling them what theyneeded to know and so on and when we tried to get to the bottom of this werealised that they were expecting to walk away with sets of targets met and youknow hard data about outcomes and things; which we were never being askedto find actually.3.4 Chapter Summary1. Evaluators have each adopted a range of summative, formative, and forsome, dialogic approaches to engaging with partnerships reflecting theirChapter 3 45
multiple roles at different stages in partnerships’ development. Evaluationmaterial is disseminated through reports, presentations and workshops,websites, and some evaluators attend partnership board meetings, subgroupsor other organisational structures. A number of evaluators emphasised theimportance of ongoing dialogue with strategic partners about theirdevelopment rather than simply providing summative evaluation outputs.2. The importance of adopting appropriate means of feeding back evaluationmessages to a range of stakeholders including strategic partners, serviceproviders and children, young people and their families who used Children’sFund services was recognised by some evaluators. Some produced ‘childfriendly’ versions of reports or disseminated findings at events that involvedchildren and young people. However, it would appear that few evaluatorsprioritised service users, including children and young people, as an importantaudience of evaluation findings.3. Many local evaluations developed approaches to raising the capacity ofChildren’s Fund projects to self-evaluate their work through means such asworking alongside project staff in developing appropriate self-evaluation‘tools’, or through providing training.4. A number of local evaluation reports identified where their recommendationshave been developed into tangible changes in the partnership. Others wereuncertain about how evaluation material had or would influence thepartnership. Evaluations appear to be offering material to partnerships to beused instrumentally, that is, through changing their practices and/or decidingwhich projects to re-commission. Local evaluation also appears to be usedconceptually in terms of expanding partnerships’ understandings relating toprevention, partnership working and participation (that is an enlightenmentmodel of the relationship between evaluation and decision making).5. Evaluators suggested that they could have more influence on partnerships byproviding findings that are relevant, useful, timely, accessible to a range ofstakeholders, and provide realistic recommendations. The importance ofengendering a relationship in which the partnership recognises the value ofevaluation and is open to both positive and more critical feedback was alsonoted.46Chapter 3
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RESEARCHLocal Evaluation ofChildren
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ContentsExecutive SummaryIIntroduct
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Local Evaluation of the Children’
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10. Local evaluators highlighted th
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Page 16: 38. Conditions reinforcing effectiv
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Page 25 and 26: 1. Process evaluation: critical ass
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Page 33 and 34: acknowledge that findings presented
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Page 40 and 41: place. In one Wave One evaluation t
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Page 56 and 57: highlighted in Table 1). These incl
Page 58 and 59: of had an impact. So we used a case
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