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

Chapter 4: Prevention, Participation and PartnershipWorking: Key Messages from Children’s FundLocal Evaluation Reports.This chapter reflects on a number of key messages presented within local evaluationreports and how these relate to the themes driving the Children’s Fund programme,namely, prevention and preventative services, children and young people’sparticipation and partnership working. Some of the ways local evaluators havesought to conceptualise prevention, participation and partnership working are alsohighlighted.4.1 Key Messages from Local Evaluation: Prevention and Preventative ServicesThe focus of local evaluators’ work on prevention has been to analyse the activitiesof Children’s Fund projects. Relatively few reports concentrate on the place ofprevention and early intervention, other than in very broad policy terms, such as howthe local prevention strategy relates to Children’s Fund planning. Hence, mostevaluations have sought to conceptualise prevention in relation to the Children’sFund sub-objectives, and/or to the outcomes framework in Every Child Matters intheir assessments of projects’ progress. A number of evaluators also drew on thefour ‘tiers’ of prevention (diversionary; early prevention; heavy end prevention; andrestorative prevention) adopted in the Children’s Fund Guidance based on the workof Hardiker, et al. (1991) as a frame of reference for locating the activities ofChildren’s Fund services.As noted above, measuring/demonstrating effective prevention was most widelyattempted through quantitative analysis of project monitoring/secondary statisticaldata sets and multiple methods in which service providers and service users’perspectives were elicited in order to attempt to show that preventative services hadhad a positive impact on service users’ circumstances and to identify the practicesthey employed that were effective. There were many positive messages in localevaluation reports in relation to the beneficial impacts of Children’s Fund preventiveprojects. Illustrating the sorts of conclusions evaluations are reaching on preventativeactivities a report on a Wave One partnership summarises that:The children and young people who access services funded by the X Children’sFund are benefiting from the support that is being provided. The Fund isreaching and supporting children and young people who are suffering socialexclusion, some of them at high levels. Families are also benefiting from thework of the X Children’s Fund in ways that are helping to reduce the effects ofpoverty… The X Children’s Fund has actively supported innovative work whichpoints to new models of working with children and young people.Chapter 4 49