Analysing data can shape early years services and practice but it is often overlooked by the sector. This session explains why this is a missed opportunity, citing data from the first year of the revised Early Years Foundation Stage Profile and how this is revealing trends about children’s developmental needs.

Research by Kings College London found that formal evaluation and monitoring practices were rarely effective in gaining an accurate understanding of the importance of youth work for young people. Instead, they risked reinforcing negative stereotypes about young people and shifting evaluations towards short-term targeted projects that are easier to measure at the expense of open-access youth provision. The session explores the research findings and how evaluations can be adapted to capture the outcomes that young people prioritise.

Randomised controlled trials (RCT) are the gold standard in research and produce the strongest evidence to underpin developments in practice. However, culture and cost have been among the barriers to running RCTs in children’s services. Despite these challenges, charity Coram has recently completed successful RCTs on Family Group Conferencing and Life Story Work. The session sets out the core components of the evaluations and how they were delivered successfully.

A parliamentary inquiry highlighted how the use of evaluation is not fully embedded in the children’s social care sector, which is holding back work to develop evidence-based approaches to services and practice. It is a theme identified in the Care Review, which proposes the creation of a National Data and Technology Taskforce to support improvement in the collection, sharing and use of data to inform decisions.
This session will explore:
• the aspects of evaluation in children's social care that need improving
• findings from the Care Review on the quality of evidence and proposals for change
• existing sector initiatives to improve the use of evidence and impact data

Sporting Communities CIC run detached youth work services in a deprived area of Derbyshire. For the past 12 years, it has developed ‘an armoury of tools’ to measure softer outcomes, which are used by staff to capture impact, including recording people’s stories. These highlight ‘where the story of change starts to emerge’ and act as a repository of evidence to demonstrate the impact of support over time - in a way that cannot be measured through data or numbers.

The Education Endowment Foundation has developed a suite of resources for educators on what evidence-based interventions work best to address pupils’ specific education needs. Educators can use the resources when making decisions about how to spend their Pupil Premium budgets for children from disadvantaged families, many of whom saw the attainment gap grow during the pandemic.

Family Rights Group evaluated the impact of its advice line in improving understanding of parents’ rights, the law and social workers’ role – both at the point of delivery and six months later. It was done in conjunction with New Philanthropy Capital, which developed a cost/benefit framework that put a monetary saving on the value of the advice.

The Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) is a 10-year Home Office funded programme investigating what works to prevent children’s involvement in violence. One way it is building this knowledge is by investing in multi-site trials – a form of impact evaluation that evaluates a common practice such as mentoring across multiple locations and/or organisations. The YEF believes multi-site trials could be used to identify consistent elements of practice that can be widely adopted if found to be effective and help smaller organisations take part in large evaluation projects at a fraction of the cost. The session will explore:
• emerging findings from the trials undertaken by YEF
• challenges in delivering multi-site trials and how these can be overcome
• benefits for smaller organisations working with children and young people