Kirklees Partnership logo


Home: Our partners

Shared Evaluation Resource (SER)

ask@kirkleespartnership.org

Background

The Shared Evaluation Resource (SER) was originally set up with a remit to look at the evaluation of regeneration initiatives relating to health, children and young people with the findings of its work used to inform the reshaping of mainstream services. Its work has now broadened to support a range of projects funded through Neighbourhood Renewal. This includes work in the areas of employment and adult social care.

The team is based within the Kirklees Partnership Secretariat, to signal the independence of the team from the organisations whose services it evaluates.

Objectives

The SER contributes to shared service developments through a core team whose objectives are:
  • Building the capacity and skills of service managers and staff with a role in undertaking evaluation activity
  • Ensuring any evaluation activity is initiated properly, and will therefore be of real value in informing service development
  • Improving links between existing staff in organisations that have a role in supporting and providing evaluation related activity.
Throughout all this work the SER maintains focused on areas of work characterised by shared outcomes, shared service delivery and that consequently require shared approaches to evaluation.

Who the SER is

The SER is a multidisciplinary team of 4 people that draws on a range of specialist skills in information management, geographical information systems, marketing and marketing research, economics and statistics. Having this range of skills to draw on in one team means that it is able to provide fresh ideas on problems from a number of disciplines.

What the SER does

The SER has supported the evaluation of Sure Start programmes to help Kirklees meet the requirements of the Every Child Matters policy agenda. This has included the recruitment and training and development of a network of evaluation officers in children's and adult services.

It has developed the management information systems for programmes such as Healthy Living Centres. Such systems are an important basis for evaluation and customer understanding.

The SER supports the evaluation of many of the major Neighbourhood Renewal funded programmes. This includes the Programme of Better Futures projects that aim to narrow the educational attainment gap between disadvantaged areas and the rest of Kirklees. It also supports the evaluation of programmes related to employment and health.

SER provides access to commercial datasets that enrich our understanding of the lives of the Kirklees population. It uses this to support market segmentation and initial understanding of target groups in the population.

The SER approach

The team takes an approach of seeking to understand the policy drivers that services are responding to and the decisions they will need to make. It uses this understanding to provide challenge to how resources are being used and how evidence is being applied. The SER seeks to provide information rather than data that can be used at both a strategic and an operational level to inform decision making. It also encourages the services it works with to think differently about how they may deliver to the public.

It works with senior managers and front line staff to improve their understanding of evaluation through the whole project planning process. The SER has developed an evaluation process that can be applied to projects to ensure they can be evaluated. This involves ensuring they have clear rationales, objectives and an understanding of the target groups they are trying to help.

The SER takes development of its skills and expertise seriously and actively seeks out new tools and techniques that can be used to inform our understanding of how services work. One such example has been the application of social network analysis (a technique for representing how people are connected) to understand the integration of children's services.

The SER supports partner organisations to develop their skills of customer understanding. This is part of its role in ensuring projects are set up based on insight into the lives and values of the communities they seek to help and hence are attuned to their target groups.

Services

The SER offers a range of service levels, from advice to full evaluation. It has a limited fieldwork capacity and can commission this, but its real strength is in providing consultancy and technical advice. A list of services offered is provided below.
  • Proposal development - identifying if projects are evaluable and what key questions / decisions the evaluation will be used to address. It develops appropriate methodologies.
  • Critical appraisal - of the evidence base that activity is based on.
  • Customer insight - advice on how to gain and use customer insight to better understand markets and behaviour that services may seek to influence.
  • Development of management information systems - to inform customer insight and evaluation.
  • Access to commercial data sets - that contribute to customer insight and application of Geographical Information software to improve the presentation and ease of use of this data.
  • Social marketing - SER uses its experience in helping services understand what they are trying to achieve, coupled with its understanding of customer insight to support the development of focussed programmes around behaviour change.
  • Commissioning of evaluation work from proposal to specification, to tendering and contract management.
  • Quantitative analysis of survey data through the use of specialist packages such as SPSS.
  • Qualitative analysis of data from interviews and focus groups through the use of specialist packages.
  • Social Network Analysis - SER is developing capacity in using this technique to understand the informal relations within organisations, that are so important to get things done.
  • Report writing and synthesis of information - to tell the story of what is happening.

Training

The SER provides training courses through the public health training programme on evaluation and the insight aspect of social marketing. It can also provide bespoke training.

New developments

  • Locality Lifestyles
    A new CD based product, Locality Lifestyles, provides access to a host of information at postcode level about the demographics, income, leisure and shopping habits of those living in the area. Maps and detailed text descriptions are provided. The CD is available from Autumn 2007.
  • Social Network Analysis (SNA)
    The SER is trialling a new technique for understanding the relationships between staff in the Children and Young People's Service. SNA is based on small world theory - and allows us to view pictorially who links to whom over the course of a process. It is useful in understanding who the key players really are and where networks need further support to develop.

    More information: http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/methods/publications/snacourse/snacourseweb.html

Completed work

Contact details

The SER is able to provide advice to services interested in genuinely evaluating activity to inform future planning and service delivery.