Break

About the work

Break work across East Anglia giving children, young people and families the time, support, and care they need to achieve their full potential. In 2021 they wanted to commission support to develop a new outcome and evaluation framework for their informal youth activities and opportunity sessions. They wanted to create a more standardised approach to monitoring and evaluation across a range of grant funded services, to create a robust evidence-base that clearly demonstrating the impact of Break’s services to young people leaving care, and build the capacity of the team to better understand the purpose and value of monitoring and evaluation.

What we did

Our approach to developing the evaluation framework was built on the principles of co-design, recognising and placing equal value on our own expertise in evaluation design and delivery, but also the expertise of Break and the experience of young people as participants of evaluation. We carried out a series of workshops and consultation with the team and young people to create a Theory of Change for the Opportunities and Mentoring services, and understand what methods would work best to capture outcomes achieved. We created a suite of tools and delivered training in how to collect and analyse evaluation data.

The difference we made

The evaluation framework and toolkit we produced has enabled Break to collect robust evaluation data in a more systematic way, and has improved their approach to capturing quantitative outcome data. The training has built the skills and confidence of the team to collect data and use this to improve the services they provide to young people.