The RF4 framework was devised by Merseyside-based youth charity Vibe UK to help describe and demonstrate the value of youth work to partners and funders. This session will show how it has helped drive collaboration across sectors to create a sustainable and impactful youth strategy.

It will cover:
• Implementation, training, accreditation and how the framework is embedded in programmes
• Alignment with existing outcomes frameworks and tools to measure and demonstrate the impact of youth work
• Practice case studies and strategies for pooling funding to ensure a shared responsibility for youth provision

This workshop will look at ways in which a small, regional charity proactively collects feedback from beneficiaries and turns it into evidence to demonstrate impact. It will focus on how to actively engage a small sample group and use the power of close connections between employees and beneficiaries to make the data meaningful and worthwhile and promote further engagement. Delegates can expect an evaluation overview, ideas-sharing and problem-solving from one small charity to others.

Black children are overrepresented in care and face significant delays in adoption. There is a shortage of Black prospective adopters. The Black Adoption Project is taking a bold approach to address these disparities and transform adoption systems in London. This session will share the project’s approach to partnership and co-creation and provide practical insights into engaging Black voices in evaluation, tackling power imbalances, and driving race equity. It will explore creative solutions, challenges, and key learnings from evaluation activities intended to shape sustainable, systemic change.

In the fast-paced world of AI, new and innovative applications are being sought for the evaluation of children’s services. This session will explore the latest advances in technologies and their applications to evaluation. It will reveal the opportunities, advantages and pitfalls in this unavoidable brave new world.

Outcome measurement is often resisted by practitioners and those they support because it is seen as disconnected from the “real work”. The Outcomes Star offers a different approach, supporting conversations about the needs and progress of young people and simultaneously producing rich outcomes data for learning from individual to commissioner level. In collaboration with charity Young Futures, which works with young people in care and care leavers, this session will explain the benefits of this system as an integral part of keywork and show how it works in practice.

As the What Works Centre for Children and Families, Foundations generates and champions actionable evidence that improves services to support family relationships. This session will give an overview of the kinds of evaluations carried out in the sector, the questions these different kinds of evaluations can answer, and how you can use evaluation evidence to help make spending decisions. It will also outline some of the areas in which we urgently need more, good quality evaluation, with a particular focus on domestic abuse.

Local authorities across England and Wales have worked with the Centre for Emotional Health to embed impact measurement in programme delivery. This session will explore the value of collaboration to increase breadth, depth and power of outcomes data. It will also show how children’s centres in Liverpool have embedded impact measurement and evaluation to support delivery and provide evidence for funders.

What if the evaluation tools we used could not only measure the progress children make but could actually support them to make that progress? This presentation will discuss some of the limits of current deficit-based models of evaluation and the potential harm they cause and present a new asset-based approach developed with and for young people.