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

More documents

Recommendations

Info

and that in many localities, local authority agencies took the lead in programme setup, whilst voluntary and community organisations tended to be more active later intheir roles as service providers. Some reports note a degree of frustration amongvoluntary and community stakeholders who felt they had relatively limited influencecompared to some statutory agencies, although this was not the case across allpartnerships. In some partnerships voluntary and community organisations had ahigh profile in partnership board activities and the Children’s Fund was seen as bothraising the profile of the voluntary and community sector and as promoting productiverelations with statutory sector agencies.A number of more recent evaluation reports speculated on the ways the relationshipsbetween the statutory and voluntary and community sectors may play out aschildren’s trusts become established. A commonly-held anxiety is that gains madethrough Children’s Fund activity may be lost in the next phase of integratingchildren’s services as it was predicted that the voluntary and community sector wouldbe relatively marginal in decision making. Illustrating this point one report suggests:The Children’s Fund has assisted working relations between the statutory andvoluntary and community sectors, but some voluntary organisations seethemselves as being at risk of again being on the margins with the move to thelocal authority taking the lead in integrating children’s services through theChildren’s Trust.However, some local evaluation reports point to concerns among voluntary andcommunity sector stakeholders as closer relationships between themselves and thestatutory sector might undermine the distinctive skills and working practices that havebeen deemed valuable within Children’s Fund partnerships. For example, a WaveOne evaluation described how the ‘anti-managerial’ culture of voluntary andcommunity organisations and their independence had facilitated work with ‘hard-toreach’families: ‘… sometimes independence becomes necessary for voluntary andcommunity organisations to maintain a critical distance from mainstreamarrangements for the benefit of particular groups of children’.Some local evaluators identified links between partnership boards and other strategicgroups in the locality, and that board members were familiar with policy changes inother sectors that would impact on the Children’s Fund programme. Other reportsrecorded mixed experiences among strategic Children’s Fund stakeholders abouthow well connected they were to other strategic groups, with some board membersacross different programmes tending to feel relatively uninformed about widerChapter 4 57
strategic changes in children’s services. Some evaluators noted that partnershipboards generally felt dislocated from the broader strategic environment, andrecognised they needed to connect with other strategic groups to prepare for themainstreaming issues concerning the future of the Children’s Fund. Some localevaluators also noted, however, that emerging networks and working practices wouldbe valuable as partnerships prepared for the move towards more integratedchildren’s services, as one Wave Two report suggests:… [there has been] considerable progress in breaking down professionalbarriers between respective organisations that traditionally have not workedeffectively together. This would appear to be one of the key legacies of the XChildren’s Fund that needs to be sustained in the Children’s Trust.4.4 Chapter Summary1. The focus of local evaluators’ work on prevention has been to analyse theactivities of Children’s Fund projects. Most evaluations conceptualisedprevention in relation to the Children’s Fund sub-objectives, and/or to theEvery Child Matters outcomes framework in assessing projects’ progress. Anumber of evaluators related the work of projects to the four ‘tiers’ ofprevention adopted in the Children’s Fund Guidance.2. Local evaluators widely report on the beneficial impacts of Children’s Fundpreventive projects on children and young people’s lives and that manyprojects are effective at targeting ‘hard to reach’ groups of children and youngpeople. Some evaluators suggest that voluntary and community organisationshave been particularly successful in engaging and addressing the needs oftraditionally excluded groups through offering alternative approaches to thoseof the mainstream agencies in terms of being flexible, accessible and nonstigmatising.3. Understandings of ‘prevention’ among strategic stakeholders and serviceproviders within partnerships tend to be described in local evaluation reportsas divergent, although some acknowledge that progress is being made bypartnership boards in negotiating a consensus of understanding.58Chapter 4
Page 1 and 2:
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 54 and 55: participation and work towards the
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: Where partnership working was descr
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
show all

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

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?