Activities for Service Evaluation

Are you ready to RISE to the participation challenge?

Here are just some ideas tried out by HCF or others which you might want to try.

Regular feedback from children and young people

Good service evaluation is based on ongoing dialogue with the service users. It is important that there is a culture of listening, where children and young people know their views are valued and will be taken in to account in decisions made. There may be a board or council of young people who meet with managers. For everyday comments, a graffitti board, online guestbook or blog, a comments box, regular quick evaluations with thumbs up or down can all contribute to an overview of how the service is performing and will build confidence in children and young people that their involvement counts.
 

Draw and write - the Noreen Wetton (1998) Confidence to Learn Approach

This approach was used for the "Are we there yet?"  consultation. Children are asked to draw themselves feeling good about an experience or situation and then to write about why they felt good in the drawing. They can also be asked to draw themselves feeling not so good and so on.

If you can get big rolls of paper, children can work in two's and draw round one of them and then thoughts and feelings about services can be written down around the person. Different coloured pens can be used for different questions so that it is easier to collate the information from the drawings later. The Forum's Consultation Worker used this method when working with a small team on a couple of consultations outwith Highland with school children about health and school meals.  Click here to have a link to coverage of one of these events.

Talking mats - for those who use symbols

This approach was used in a consultation about respite services. The child needs to be familiar with using a happy and an unhappy symbol. A mat is then used with a division between happy and sad. Children can then place symbols according to how they feel about them - happy or sad. To test if the children are understanding what they are doing, throw in a few red herrings, things you know they definitely will or won't like.

This method was adapted for the Specialist Health services consultation when children had symbols for the services they accessed and then chose from a series of Makaton emotion stickers how they felt about them.

Chicken and egg.

Which came first the chicken or the egg? And is that chicken free range or battery? (you could refer to Jamie Oliver – all those day old chicks on a conveyor belt – just your luck whether you end up in the tray for free range or the tray for battery)
Write your ideas down on paper (or use individual post-its and stick on). Begin with egg – your unhatched ideas before you experienced this service, what did you expect it would be like? Now as a grown chicken– what has been your experience of this service?
Does it feel like free range – are your ideas listened to – do you have choice, space, time, fun? Or does it feel more like a battery hen? Do you feel like just one of a batch put through a process? And then the next egg – what do you think should happen now? What sort of experience would be better, more free range?

This activity has also been used in workshops to get adults to think about involving children and young people - by considering times in their life where they have felt either free range or battery.

Disposable cameras

Let the children free with some disposable cameras and let them take pictures of whatever they want. When the pictures come back you can ask what they mean or use emotion stickers to find the feelings they generate. This method was used with some young people in the transitions consultation, "It's My Journey".

Letter to Aliens

If you had to write to an alien from another planet who was coming to visit you....at school..out of school club etc.... what would you tell him or her beforehand about what to expect?

     Story Telling in Third Person                                  

When evaluating a local respite care service, one of the children who was upset to leave his mum to come in to respite, found it difficult to separate his negative feelings at being away from home from his actual experience of respite care. As a great Scooby Do fan, he was able to make a Scooby Do Mystery book about the respite care service. Thinking about respite in the third person enabled him to speak about the things he liked or did not like about the service.

Maps

Draw a rough map of the building/grounds/local area. Use stickers to indicate favourite places, scary places, and so on. Talk about them afterwards or provide speech bubble Post-its to write down comments or suggestions. Very young children can take part in this, using emotion stickers to show how they feel about different areas or activities.

Snakes and ladders

You know the rules, if 100 is the best and 0 is the worst, what are the ladders postive things that help young people move toward desired outcomes, what are the snakes which let the positive experience or outcome slip away? 3 snakes and 3 ladders is a good way to get the top priorities. You can then get young people to write down an experience they have of the service (Post-Its are good for this) and then score that experience between 0 and 100.

Focus group discussions

Focus group discussions can work if the person leading the group is first of all trusted by the young people and secondly is good at listening and facilatating view points without leading the discussion. Going off site for a jaunt might be useful, out for lunch or a trip to Roller Bowl or an outdoor activity centre and have discussion throughout but also in a focus group afterwards.

TOOLS

Whole School Evaluation, Lessons Learned

Questions to ask re children with communication difficulty

For a range of activity ideas try Participation Works

Service Evaluation in the Early years

 For other tools for invovlement

Next page policy design toolbox