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Evaluating the impact of the work
Effective monitoring and evaluation is a crucial and integral part of service development, enabling services to:
- assess the effectiveness of current activities and plan future service development
- disseminate knowledge about what works
- justify future investment in early home learning.
Local project evaluation needs to be underpinned by an authority-wide approach to monitoring and evaluation to identify key outcomes and develop a common framework for the collection and analysis of data. This is essential in enabling a robust assessment of the impact of work with parents on long-term outcomes for children to inform future decision-making and service planning.
The following planning and evaluation cycle shows how outcomes and measures need to be built in to service planning and development from the beginning:
Defining outcomes
Outcomes describe what will have changed for children as well as their parents as a result of a service intervention or activity. Examples of outcomes of activities to support early home learning could be that a child will achieve age-appropriate levels of pre-literacy or that a parent will feel more confident in playing with their child.
Outcomes are separate from outputs, which describe what the service will do to achieve the outcomes, for instance deliver weekly home visits.
In deciding on outcomes, careful consideration needs to be given to:
- baseline data i.e. what is the current situation and what need does the data show that will be addressed by the intervention?
- the specific aim of the intervention i.e. what change are you planning to make to the baseline data?
- long-term and short-term outcomes e.g. what changes are you hoping to make to a child's language skills by the end of a three month home visiting intervention and what changes do you hope the service will make to their cognitive development by the time they start school?
- making sure outcomes are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timed).
Designing monitoring and evaluation processes
How monitoring and evaluation is carried out is crucial to the effectiveness of the process and its ability to inform service development and improvement.
Good practice guidelines for collecting data
- Monitoring and evaluation tools are parent, child and practitioner friendly.
- Data collection methods are 'fit for purpose' and sustainable: they don't collect more information than is necessary and contribute to a valuable learning experience for both parents and practitioners.
- Innovative and varied data collection methods are used to include parents with different literacy and linguistic needs, for instance video diaries.
- Both qualitative and quantitative evidence is included. Information is collected about the effectiveness of the processes used in work with parents, as well as about the outcomes.
- Evaluation processes enable comparison and continuous tracking against baseline data to demonstrate impact e.g. the use of pre and post normative questionnaires.
- Evaluation methods combine locally developed processes with standardised external analytical tools.
- Practitioners are trained to use evaluation tools effectively and to encourage parent participation in evaluation by explaining the purpose and benefits, and providing necessary support to parents..
- Information is shared with parents (at an individual and service level) and practitioners to support reflection, confidence building and learning.
There are a number of sources of specialist advice that can provide more information about standard measures you can use to evaluate your service and that can help you to design an evaluation process that meets your needs. These include:
- research department within your authority
- research departments within university schools of social care or psychology
- National Academy of Parenting Practitioners research team
- Family and Parenting Institute
- independent research consultants.
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