Service Evaluation

All services working with children should involve children and young people in their service evaluation. The recent Concordat Agreement (SG 2007) places a duty on service providers to listen to service users. The Crerar Review (2007) concluded that the service provider should evidence meeting standards through a process of self-assessment which includes the voice of the service user. The Care Commission has 8 quality indicators which involve listening to children and young people.

Are you ready to RISE to the participation challenge?

To be inclusive the best way is often to use a Mosaic Approach - where you offer more than one way for children/young people to get involved and then let them choose. This will build up a broader picture of what is really going on.

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

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?

                                         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.

TOOLS

A whole school evlaution 

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