Evaluating innovation and building that into decision-making is
fundamental to good spending of public money. The Department for
Education's (the Department's) approach provides an example of
using evaluation which will be of value to other departments,
according to the National Audit Office (NAO).
The quality of children's
social care matters. Where it is not adequate, children in need
of help or protection may be exposed to neglect, abuse or harm.
Since 2014 the Department has committed some £333 million to fund
a range of innovation projects intended to help local authorities
improve outcomes for children and develop new ways of
working.
From 2014 to 2020, the
Department funded the Children's Social Care Innovation Programme
(the Innovation Programme) and has continued to finance successor
programmes after 2020.
The Innovation Programme funded
94 projects, including an integrated mental health, education and
families service to support children in or on the edge of care;
targeted support for young people to secure more stable
placements and a positive transition to adulthood; and
relationship-based support for women who have experienced removal
of their children into care.
From the outset, the Department
made evaluation and dissemination of learning a central part of
the Innovation Programme. It made evaluation a condition of
receiving funding and appointed research teams to carry out
evaluations of projects. The Department strengthened its approach
as time went on, including developing a new strategy to assess
the robustness of evaluation plans.
Most evaluations of individual
local projects noted positive results and some reported cost
savings. For example, 42 of the 56 projects completed between
2014 and 2016 reported improvements in the quality of services,
and 21 reported cost savings.
The Department carried out its
own reviews of project evaluations. It has also commissioned and
published independent assessments which have highlighted a number
of challenges and limitations of the evaluations carried out on
individual projects. For example, independent reviewers noted
that evaluations were affected by short timescales over which
impacts were measured, small sample sizes, and a lack of genuine
comparison groups or high-quality data. The Department
subsequently used learning from the Innovation Programme to
design more sophisticated evaluations of projects in successor
schemes.
The Department was transparent
and followed best practice by publishing the findings of its
evaluations. It published evaluation reports for projects
representing 90% of the Programme's value. This contrasts
favourably with the findings of a 2021 NAO report which found
that only 36% by spend of the projects in the Government Major
Projects Portfolio had evaluation plans in
place.1
Since the Innovation Programme
came to an end in 2020, the Department has continued to fund
children's social care innovation projects and has commissioned
evaluations that measure impact over a longer period. For
example, it wanted the evaluation for Strengthening Families - a
programme testing the impact of supporting three Innovation
Programme projects across 17 additional local authorities - to be
as robust as possible so it could determine with greater
certainty whether the projects work and in what
conditions.
To help other departments learn
from its approach, the Department for Education should aim to
clearly demonstrate how its funding of innovation in local
authorities will lead to better use of public money, wider
dissemination of good practice across the sector, and improved
outcomes for children in and around the care system.
, the head of the NAO,
said:
"Putting evaluation at the
heart of the Innovation Programme allowed the Department for
Education to identify and promote the projects that have the
greatest potential to make a difference for children and their
families. The Department's approach provides an example for other
public bodies to follow, and we would encourage it to share its
learning to support evidence-based decision-making and efficient
spending of public money."
-
ENDS
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Notes for
Editors
-
National Audit Office:
Evaluating government
spending (December 2021).
