• The knowledge and learning that we gather enables the Children’s Fund projects to adapt and evolve during their lifetime, maximising their usefulness for the children and families they are working with.
• To identify what is not working so that the issues can be addressed
• To provide evidence for funding applications
• Evaluation can direct future choices and decisions which face planners, policy makers and funding agencies
• To provide evidence of how public money is being spent and what extent it is ‘value for money’

The Children’s Fund Northamptonshire is taking three different approaches to monitoring and evaluation:

1. Monitoring

Each project records statistical information relating to what they have done and with whom, and submits it to the Children’s Fund Northamptonshire’s central team every three months. This information enables both the local and national teams to see who the interventions are working with and monitor changes to the services. The monitoring forms collect data covering:

• Project objectives
• Target groups
• Age, gender and ethnicity of users
• Types of additional support (disability, special educational needs)
• Frequency of use
• Location of services
• How projects are supporting young people and their families
• Activities undertaken
• Expenditure

2. Action Inquiry Groups

This part of the evaluation process is being managed by a research organisation called SOLAR (www.uwe.ac.uk/solar)

A series of four half day action inquiry groups are being held across Northamptonshire at two monthly intervals. Children’s Fund project workers from each of the projects attend one of the groups in each round to share their experiences and perspectives of the issues and problems they encounter with other practitioners. The purpose of action inquiry is to examine the services and activities they deliver so that they:

• Continually inform practice and policy development and implementation throughout the life of the project, rather than when the project is finished
• Generate and use insights from practice to support learning
• Allow projects to explore issues and generate options for action which may not have been evident at the outset
• Modify and adapt the interventions

Parents have been invited to join some of the action inquiry groups to share experiences of their children’s schooling and how together with the project workers they can make necessary changes to Children’s Fund interventions. In addition, separate action inquiry groups are held for other groups involved with the Children’s Fund, for example:

• head teachers
• Children’s Fund management committee members
• external agencies
• children and young people

Following each action inquiry group a report is generated and information is disseminated in a newsletter format to project workers, head teachers, stakeholders and to the Children’s Fund management committee members.

3. Impact Evaluation

This evaluation will explore the different models of prevention in order to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the interventions in meeting their objectives, and what works and why. A number of tools and methods will be used to measure and evaluate effectiveness in relation to sub-objectives:

• Attendance – schools will monitor absence and lates termly by year group and by target individuals
• Attainment – monitoring individual children who are being supported in improving their level of attainment
• Crime – evaluating the impact of interventions in reducing nuisance and offending behaviour in their neighbourhoods, and support for children and young people who have been victims of crime
• Health – self-esteem scales will measure changes in self-esteem over the period of the intervention
• Accessibility – tracking routes in and out of the intervention
• Satisfaction – children and families who use the interventions will be asked to feedback their views based on the experiences of the services they are receiving via questionnaire and interview
• Capacity for participation – monitoring community and family involvement in the managing and/or delivery of interventions, and building community capacity to sustain the interventions and their services

We will also consider the four overarching themes in our evaluation of the interventions which are:

• Participation – in particular children’s involvement in development of strategy, planning, delivery, and evaluation of services
• Crime prevention – in addition to evaluating impact we will be examining how the Children’s Fund interventions relate to other preventative agencies
• Family support – in depth examinations of the ways in which interventions provide support for families
• Home school partnerships – study of the value of this model for improving the lives of children in school