Monitoring, evaluation and review are essential to ensuring the success of Core aim 7 or any child poverty strategy.
They enable you to:
- Establish the overall effectiveness of the strategy
- Review and amend the strategy in the light of successes and failures, and changing social, policy and practice environments, to ensure its continued effectiveness
- Understand whether actions and initiatives are achieving the intended results, and if not, why not
- Measure progress towards targets and objectives
A framework for systematic monitoring, evaluation and review should be established as part of your approach, the Welsh Assembly Government guidance requires an annual review of all children and young people's plans.
Establishing a performance framework
Any framework for the monitoring, evaluation and review of action to reduce child poverty, as far as possible, should be integrated into existing systems.
It should identify:
- How information will be collected, including the establishment of systems for obtaining new information
- How those affected by the strategy will be able to feed back
- Who is responsible for carrying out monitoring, evaluation and review of the strategy, and who will be involved or consulted
- When monitoring, evaluation and review should be carried out. You may want to evaluate the strategy more frequently in the first year (for example, after three months, then six months, then annually), or to link in with other planning and evaluation cycles
- How results will be reported to stakeholders
Sharing performance information
To effectively deliver on the child poverty agenda there will be a need to develop local means of sharing performance information between partners and the government in a coordinated way. A good example is the Wigan system. This is online and in real-time, all partners and the government office have access to it. It operates efficiently by bringing together performance data from all sources, identifies where targets overlap and removes duplication at a local level.
Iin Wales, differing children and young people's partnerships will have differing approaches to performance management, the use of FFYNNON and the Children, Young, People and Maternity Services National Service Framework may be a useful resource for the performance management arrangements for child poverty reduction.
Responding to performance challenges
The need to reduce the incidence of child poverty in Wales, is an emerging and extremely complex agenda. Across Wales there will be huge variances in the incidence of child poverty as a result of historical legacy, demographics and local economic context.
If partnerships are to address child poverty in coming years it is important to have accurate performance data to ensure targeted action and measurements that detail the level and pace of improvement.
Good practice across the public sector indicates that effective performance management entails more than the ability to monitor performance; offering support where there are persistent performance challenges are just as vital. The children and young people's partnerships, will need to actively manage its own performance in relation to its child poverty priorities.
This can be thought of as relying on four capabilities: to identify; to diagnose; to formulate improvement plans; and to disengage.
The ability to identify, at frequent and regular intervals – whether performance is on or off track – typically uses a ‘trajectory’. A trajectory plots an expected performance curve between a baseline and a target that expires sometime in the future. Actual performance is then measured against this curve.
Where performance is off-track for a sustained period (what counts as ‘sustained’ will differ from outcome to outcome), it is necessary to diagnose the drivers of under performance. This diagnosis should be used as a base for formulating improvement plans. Where the organisation requires it, the ability to support implementation of improvement plans is also necessary.
As performance is recovered, it is time to disengage support from the organisation in question without losing the improvements made. You will want to agree your plans for addressing under performance within existing partnership arrangements.
The following pointers are the things you might want to take into account when formulating your approach:
To identify performance you should ask yourself:
- who in the partnerships, and their constituent organisations, is going to be responsible for setting targets and constructing performance trajectories?
- how will these trajectories be made transparent to the children and young peoples partnerships, and related governance arrangements?
- what will you do to identify performance challenges against trajectories?
- at what point will it be necessary to discuss further with the partnership?
To formulate improvement plans you should ask yourself:
- What arrangements will be put in place for developing improvement plans?
- What are the responsibilities of the partnership and constituent organisations?
- How will you assess the results of improvements at sufficiently frequent intervals?
- What external expertise may be needed to do this?
To disengage support successfully from the challenges that have been met -you should ask:
- What would the exit strategy be for where performance has returned to trajectory, or shows every indication of doing so?
- What frequency of monitoring will be needed to respond should performance once again dip?
Evaluation
Evaluation has key elements:
- Effectiveness - the extent to which aims and objectives are met
- Appropriateness - relevance to need
- Acceptability - to the people concerned
- Efficiency - ratio of costs to benefits
- Equity - equal provision for equal needs
Therefore a full evaluation of the strategy will cover all five. However for most purposes, an evaluation of its effectiveness is the most important in the short term. This involves analysing the data collected in the monitoring stage, to determine whether the strategy is achieving its strategic aims and objectives.
Evaluation could also include consideration of:
- How stakeholders experience the strategy
- What changes or benefits the strategy is bringing about beyond the objectives (unexpected benefits/problems)
It should consider why any targets or deadlines have not been met, and what can be done to rectify this: whether, for example, actions need to be reconsidered, implementation improved, or new or overlooked factors taken into account. In the longer term, all five elements of evaluation (as above) should be considered.
Annual Review
Welsh Assembly Government guidance states that the children and young peoples plans should be reviewed annually. This review should take into account:
- The findings of the monitoring and evaluation, including successes and problems
- Environmental changes (for example, policy/legislative; economic; and social changes) which may demand new or different responses
- Developments in other localities (or within the local area) - are new schemes emerging as examples of good practice which can be learnt from?
- Feedback from those affected by the strategy
If as a result of the review significant changes to the strategy are required, these should be consulted on.