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

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Local Evaluation of the Children’s Fund Initiative:Opportunities, Challenges and ProspectsThis report focuses on exploring four themes:• The roles, orientations and principles of local evaluators;• the evaluation methods that have been adopted by local evaluations;• the ways local evaluations have sought to support partnerships’ decisionmaking;• Key messages emerging from local evaluators’ reports and the ways localevaluators have sought to understand the underpinning themes of theChildren’s Fund initiative, namely, prevention, participation and partnershipworking.Executive summaryIntroduction1. There is a growing emphasis on evidence-based policy and practice in theUK. The Children’s Fund has fully embraced the importance of supportingpartnerships’ evidence based decision-making with local evaluation.2. Traditional experimental research and evaluation methods are now widelyseen as inappropriate for identifying what works in complex community-basedinitiatives such as the Children’s Fund where the relationships betweeninterventions and outcomes can be very complicated.3. The importance of drawing on qualitative as well as quantitative research andevaluation methods is widely recognised in some government departments. Itis also recognised that it may be appropriate to combine different evaluationmethods to address different questions in different settings. ‘Lay’ experiencesand perspectives such as service users’ views are now far more widely seenas legitimate forms of evidence than they were historically.4. In the past, evaluation has tended to be equated with auditing andperformance management. Evaluation is now often seen as generatingExecutive Summaryi
learning for policy makers and practitioners by providing formative or evendialogic forms of feedback.5. A number of factors and conditions influence the impact of research andevaluation on policy and practice. These include perceptions of the credibilityof evaluation, the ways evaluation findings are presented and disseminated,the relevance and usefulness of findings and the external pressures on policymakers and practitioners to act on findings.Roles and principles of local Children’s Fund evaluations6. The Children’s Fund Guidance establishes that partnerships shouldcommission local evaluations of their programmes of work, although variationsreflect individual partnership’s needs and priorities. Hence, local evaluators’roles have tended to correspond with partnerships’ starting points (in terms ofwave, for example), timetables of development, and to social andgeographical contexts. Some evaluators have been commissioned toundertake whole programme evaluations, whilst others focus on particularaspects of programmes’ work or selected activities and projects.7. The range of roles adopted by local evaluators includes generating learningabout processes intended to support partnerships’ strategic planning, ongoingmanagement and development, and providing an evidence base that informsthe development of mainstream preventative strategies and children andfamilies’ services.8. Evaluators have also aimed to measure impacts/outcomes of Children’s Fundactivities in terms of how sub-objectives have been addressed, how theinitiative has impacted on the lives of service users and how effectively targetgroups have been reached. This is described by evaluators as forming anevidence base on which partnerships are able to make decisions, rather thatsimply as a summative record of performance. This material is also intendedto inform decisions about projects and activities in terms of whether tocontinue to fund or promote for mainstreaming.9. Some evaluators have actively supported projects and programmes’capacities to undertake evaluation and monitoring activities themselvesthrough, for example, providing training and designing ‘toolkits’.iiExecutive Summary
Page 1 and 2: RESEARCHLocal Evaluation ofChildren
Page 4 and 5: When citing this report please show
Page 6 and 7: ContentsExecutive SummaryIIntroduct
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 and 74:
Where partnership working was descr
Page 75 and 76:
strategic changes in children’s s
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?