Our education list focuses on education policy and politics and the inequalities that are both built into education systems and perpetuated by them. It speaks to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education.
Our titles, including Arun Verma’s Anti-Racism in Higher Education, address the challenges in education, including those around technology and the digital divide. The list offers students and researchers internationally sourced evidence-based solutions that challenge traditional neoliberal approaches to learning.
This chapter considers some of the dangers of national, centrally-driven evaluations, arguing that the main reason why evaluations cannot explain what works is their relative neglect of the perspectives and experiences of the central actors. It focuses on the connection between ‘the new and quasi-scientific language of programme evaluation’ and the ‘actuarial-interventionist logic of contemporary youth justice’. It shows the ways in which evaluation becomes more a part of a process by which compliance with programme goals can be assured than a scientific attempt to assess the effectiveness of different strategies. It discusses how the Youth Justice Board and the Home Office were seeking clear evidence of the crime reduction that the youth offending flagship was intended to deliver.
This chapter examines the difficulties representing the views of people using mental health services. It focuses on the effectiveness of Patient Councils in acute psychiatric hospitals, facilitated by group advocates from an independent mental health advocacy organisation. It determines major problems in accurately expressing the views of patients to hospital managers on key issues in the therapeutic environment such as restraint and over-medication. It discusses how services users sometimes tempered their own ideas through fear of reprisal and were also prevented from identifying changes they would like because their own expectations of change were so low. It concludes that evaluation of these programmes needs to focus as much on process as outcomes and to question the underlying mechanisms if it is to make a useful contribution to developing good practice.
This chapter explores how the concept of social capital can be adapted and employed as a tool for participative evaluation of community-based work. It considers social capital as an excellent framework for evaluation and one which allows people to demonstrate the impact of their work with communities and inform their own practice and project development. It notes that the key feature of the framework is that learning must be shared. It highlights the need to offer training to local participants about social capital, employ local people or community members as workers, adopt a flexible and responsive management style, support the collection of both quantitative and qualitative data, and provide long-term funding for initiatives.
This chapter examines the evidence-based policy discourse for assuming that there can be clear and uncontested outcomes from interventions, which can then be fed back into policy implementation. It explores the extent to which this rational process was achieved in two local regeneration initiatives established as part of the URBAN programme in Brighton and Nottingham. It concludes that the learning from the evaluation was limited to those directly involved and registers the disappointment felt by participants that the learning from URBAN was not taken on board by the New Deal for Communities (NDC). This is attributed to the determination of the NDC to start afresh without concern that they might be reinventing wheels and this failure to learn from past experiences as seen as a characteristic of the last thirty years of regeneration programmes in the UK.
This chapter explores the role of the evaluator working within inevitable external constraints. It advocates a theory driven perspective that positions the evaluator and project members as teachers and learners within a shared project. It emphasises what works as opposed to the barriers to development. It identifies a range of techniques that can be effectively deployed in both community and classroom settings, including narrative inquiry, leading to the positive conclusion that participatory evaluation can benefit all involved if carried out in the spirit of a learning partnership.
This chapter examines a partnership approach in Sunderland to supporting people into employment. It identifies ways to improve partnership working. It discusses how partner members from similar organisations found advantages in cooperating rather than competing and were motivated through sharing useful information and applying their new knowledge to their own organisations. It notes that it was easier to influence internal rather than external problems, suggesting that a ‘realistic evaluation’ understanding stakeholders’ perceptions may be futile if the wider macro-context is not supportive. It employs the case study to extend Piachaud’s framework of types of capital.
This chapter identifies contrasting findings from partnership evaluations, including a more efficient use of staff resources, better service provision, and a more satisfying working environment, although these are countered by frustration with the slowness of procedures and a lack of economies of scale. It examines some of the political issues surrounding interagency evaluation, noting in particular the deep structural divide between health and social care, the place of private-public concordats, the problematic definition of boundaries, and funding issues. It then links these issues to the policy arena with its rapidly changing legislation and guidance and endless reorganisations. It concludes that the extent of evaluation in this context has been limited and that, where evaluations have been completed, little appears to have taken place in response to their findings.
This chapter demonstrates how participative evaluation can develop over time. It discusses the issues that emerge in evaluating parenting projects and interventions designed to offer information and support to the parents of teenagers. It discusses how both process and outcome evaluation were found to be important, particularly in understanding what parents themselves had gained. It determines conflicting views among senior staff and funders on the aims and purposes of evaluation, including looking for facts and figures to justify the project’s funding, identifying how well the project has gone and what can be learnt from it, and deciding if the project has met its objectives.
This chapter returns to the New Deal for Communities (NDC) initiative with a reflective discussion of the utility of evaluation. It notes that evaluation is seen as a process of knowledge generation that can inform policy development and policy implementation. It considers the evaluation discourses for stakeholders in NDC evaluation in terms of the implementation structure of evaluation, preferred forms of knowledge, attitudes to institutional learning, and change and geographic tactics for knowledge acquisition. It concludes that if NDCs are to develop the capacity for institutional learning then national evaluation must play a key role, addressing both the current crisis in utilising evidence from evaluation as well as disseminating findings effectively at all levels.
Evaluation has become a central tool in the development of contemporary social policy. Its widespread popularity is based on the need to provide evidence of the effectiveness of policies and programmes. This book sees evaluation as an inherently political activity, as much about forms of governance as scientific practice. Using a wide range of examples from neighbourhood renewal, health and social care, and other aspects of social policy, it relates practical issues in evaluation design to their political contexts. The book considers key issues in the politics of evaluation including governance and evaluation, participatory evaluation, partnerships and evaluation, and learning from evaluation.
