Children's Social Care Innovation Programme evaluation framework.

Descriptions

The Department for Education is inviting bids for organisations to join an evaluation framework for use by local authorities and organisations funded by the Children's Social Care Innovation Programme.The programme was announced in October 2013 by Edward Timpson, the Parliamentary under Secretary of State for Children and Families. The programme seeks to support local efforts to transform services for the most vulnerable children by providing tailored funding and professional support to innovative projects. It is an ambitious programme which seeks to inspire whole system change so that, in five years' time:1. Quality of services has increased, so that children who need help from the social care system have better life chances;2. LAs achieve better value for money across children's social care; and3. There are stronger incentives and mechanisms for innovation, experimentation and replication of successful new approaches.An overview of the whole programme, as well as details on our two focus areas, can be found on https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/childrens-services-innovation-programme. Organisations interested in bidding are strongly encouraged to familiarise themselves with these documents.Evaluation is a core component of the Innovation Programme. We need to undertake high quality evaluations of individual projects and the focus areas, and produce compelling and accessible output for practitioners, commissioners and service leaders: evaluation and the use of evidence are essential to maximise the value of the investment in the programme. We need to be able to demonstrate progress towards the programme's objectives, and identify what works, why, and in what circumstances.We are seeking to appoint a framework of around 15 organisations with proven expertise in undertaking high-quality, credible evaluation studies with children and young people and the social care sector.Appointment to the framework does not guarantee any work under the programme.Evaluation organisations will be responsible for:— Designing and undertaking evaluations of individual projects (one or more, depending on uptake) and for each evaluation answering the question: does this approach work? In what circumstances and with what ingredients?— Developing evaluation designs that are both appropriate and challenging – to draw on a range of methods to help to increase the quality of the evidence base— Producing, with the LA/funded organisation with whom they are working, useable, accessible output which appeals to its audience— Collaborating with the evaluation coordinator to support meta-level analysis, for example by feeding in data to support the evaluation coordinator in answering the question: how much progress have funded projects made towards achieving the Innovation Programme objectives?— Committing to evaluation standards and expectations agreed with and overseen by the evaluation coordinatorPlease note that the appointed evaluation coordinator will lead, on behalf of the department, the evaluation strategy. The evaluation coordinator will oversee project evaluations across the programme to ensure consistency and coherence. We are procuring the evaluation coordinator through a separate procurement exercise [https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-education/about/research].Organisations interested in the coordinator role and in being one of the evaluation framework organisations can bid for both roles but the evaluation coordinator cannot undertake individual project evaluations. As such, the appointed evaluation coordinator would have to withdraw from the evaluation framework procurement process, should they have entered both. The procurement for the coordinator role will be completed before the end of the framework application process.