'Its a Piece of Cake?'

A collaborative evaluation of

Adoption UK's parent support programme

The Evaluation Trust and the Hadley Research Centre (a national centre of adoption expertise based in the University of Bristol), have been collaborating with Adoption UK over the last 18 months, to evaluate Adoption UK’s Parent support programme, ‘A piece of Cake’.

Adoption UK is the only national charity run by and for adoptive parents, offering support before, during and after adoption. It was started in 1971 as a self help organisation.  All children who are adopted will have experienced some form of loss or trauma through being separated from their birth families.  Many adopted children will have experienced further loss and trauma through their early experiences of abuse or neglect within the birth family, which may have been compounded by numerous moves within the public care system.  For many children, this trauma may lead to emotional, behavioural, educational or development difficulties, which may also affect the children’s abilities to form secure attachments to their new parents.  Traditional parenting techniques may not work and adoptive parents may need to develop alternative parenting strategies in their role as ‘therapeutic parents’ for traumatised children.  Their services are rooted in the personal experiences of adopters, so that as an organisation they are at the centre of a selfhelp network of peer support.  The training programme, ‘A Piece of Cake’ is unique in that it is delivered by trainers who are adopters themselves.

The evaluation was designed to determine whether the current programme was successful in delivering its training objectives. Within this broad aim the evaluation also aimed to:

• understand how well the programme was working

• understand which parts of the programme had the most impact

• make recommendations for the improvement of the programme

The evaluation was part funded by the Lloyds TSB Foundation and in a competitive market needed to be rigorous, persuasive, engaging of the organisation and low cost. This involved the two organisations working together using:

• a pre-programme/post-programme design and a comparison between programme participants and other adopters who were interested in the programme but had not taken part in it to evaluate three support programmes. Questionnaires were sent to participants before the programme began, immediately after the end of training and five months after the completion of training.
• a historic evaluation of an indicative sample of twenty of the 70 support programmes over a five year period interviewing parents, commissioners, trainers, staff and those involved in developing the programme. The interview guides for all the interviews were developed jointly between Adoption UK training staff and the Evaluation Trust team. The Evaluation Trust and Adoption UK jointly trained an evaluation team consisting of 12 volunteers and staff members to interview the parents. The Evaluation Trust team also undertook parent interviews as a quality control measure as well as completing all the other stakeholder interviews.

The long and the short of it - the report due out in the autumn of 2007 offers powerful evidence on the effectiveness of the support programme from the two approaches:

• The Hadley work offers rigorous data about the short term benefits of the programme for a small group of parents and there are useful contrasts with the ‘control’ group perspectives.

• The Evaluation Trust work gives extremely consistent, in-depth qualitative data, for a large group of parents over a long period, and demonstrates the long term benefits of the programme for the parents.

The evidence collected from the two approaches cohered together well and strengthened and supported the findings of each of the pieces of work.

The approach to the evaluation of the ‘historic’ programmes attached great importance to evaluation as a process. It was hoped that the benefits of the participatory evaluation work to Adoption UK would be organisational growth, staff development, and improved effectiveness.

Participatory approaches recognise the need to involve a variety of perspectives, explanations and interpretations. Participatory research of this kind provides opportunities for empowering those taking part to put forward their own realities and influence policy. It gives rise to more nuanced and richer accounts, anchored in real lives and conducted in egalitarian and democratic ways rather than simply reflecting the realities of those with the power to define the needs and issues, and what counts as a benefit or value. Participatory evaluation is essentially a learning process, which actively involves participants in reflecting critically on their organisation, and the issues to which it is responding and Adoption UK have already started to action the learning from the report.

This collaboration has been interesting and useful - Julie Selwyn and Sarah del Tufo will be writing about it in the future.

Sarah del Tufo
31/08/2007

STOP PRESS

New training programme: 'BUILDING SKILLS IN USEFUL EVALUATION' autumn 2007 - free to small organisations. 

One day training sessions will be offered in Cornwall (Bodmin) on 20th November, Taunton, Somerset on 27th November and Stratton, Dorset on 28th November 

Do you want to improve your funding opportunities?

Do other agencies understand the value of your organisation's work?

Do you really know what difference your organisation's work makes?

Do you really struggle to collect the views of your service users?

We may be able to offer one to one support following the training

Telephone Maria Clarke, SW Projects Manager on 0117 904 2636 or Pat Diango, SW Administrator on 0117 902 9656 for more information and to book a place.

Email: maria_evaluationtrust@blueyonder.co.uk / patdiango@blueyonder.co.uk

Bursary funded by capacity Builders/Changeup - consultancy and mentoring in evaluation: understanding the basics, skills tools, building frameworks - free to small organisations. Click here to view.

Free help and advice for small groups. Click here to view.