Evaluation and good practice

The VVU recently attended an evaluation workshop to explore how we can further improve our practice, and continually improve our collection of meaningful data to measure the impact of our work.

Evaluation is critical to the VVU for many reasons, it helps us understand where we are making impact, it allows us to build on what works, helps us evidence value to the public and funding bodies, builds the case for funding for preventative approaches, and critically builds in sustainability to proven partnership approaches to reduce serious violence.

Evaluation needs to fit within all roles of the VVU, from understanding whether our campaigns are effective and meeting their objectives, through to collecting data on whether interventions are making a meaningful difference to young people and through this reducing serious violence in communities.

The day ended with the team refreshing its framework to ensure we measure the protective factors of the projects and interventions we support in a clear and consistent way, as part of demonstrating impact.

Our evaluation workshop coincided with the release of a new report from the Youth Endowment Fund – what works – and doesn’t work – in reducing violence in educational settings.

The report looks at a range of everyday practices in schools, colleges and alternative provisions drawing on evidence on how to prevent children’s involvement in violence. The report also looks at the evaluation the YEF have undertaken of violence prevention programmes that have been used in schools.

Drawing on all the evidence, five recommendations are made to education settings, with the guidance that the recommendations are used within the localised context and with the unique place based knowledge from each setting.

These are: keeping children in education; providing children with trusted adults; developing children’s social and emotional skills; targeting efforts at places and times that violence occurs – so understanding the local context and having a co-ordinated safeguarding response, and finally being aware that in this setting there is the risk of actually having the opposite effect of causing more harm.

You can read the full report at: https://youthendowmentfund.org.uk/reports/education-guidance/

We are now considering the recommendations and working with partner organisations to see how we can make sure the learning is incorporated into our local practice.