Made to measure? Evaluating community initiatives for children: Introduction.

This article introduces papers about the evaluation of community initiatives for children which were presented at a symposium organized by Great Britain's National Children's Bureau in May 2000. Practitioners who provide and deliver children's services in the community find themselves under unprecedented pressure to evaluate their work and measure its effectiveness. This is due to the fact that public policy makers in central government have not only declared a commitment to evidence-based practice, but also made monitoring and evaluation a compulsory element in a number of publicly funded programs. The papers offers differing perspectives on the practical as well as conceptual issues raised by the spreading culture of evaluation. There is confusion about purpose, different methods and over practice. Reference was made during the symposium to work on evaluation of community programs in the U.S. and the importance of articulating a plausible theory of change when planning interventions as well as when deciding how to evaluate them. A paper by Deborah Ghate shows that there is much more to evaluation than getting the right methodology and proceeding with the research.