The Hampshire Children's Fund has a comprehensive local evaluation project in place, under the aegis of Dr Mary Acton of Portsmouth University. The Partnership intends to maintain its expenditure on this evaluation as it provides a major data set to inform future direction of preventative work and the balance of the different elements.

It will be necessary to undertake a revision of planned work to encompass the five outcomes of Every Child Matters and to provide equitable measures of outcomes to be applied to the current methodology.

A copy of the local monitoring and review documentation is available from the Children’s Fund Office. Applied on an annual basis and firmly linked to the contract process, this system ensures a focus on outcomes and a method for constructing milestones and targets in cases where problems arise.

Local and National findings from evaluations are discussed at Board meetings and lessons learned are formed in action plans to guide future commissioning decisions. Early results from local evaluation identified some weaknesses in relation to outcome focus, and a relatively large number of projects focusing on play and creativity. These aspects are addressed in the current review processes and will be adjusted in line with current and developing priorities.

As a wave 3 partnership we are only now beginning to be in a position to respond to evaluation data gathered over the past year. Action planning for each of the coming three years will ensure that the lessons from both local and national data will have an increasing impact on commissioning and mainstreaming and any necessary re-allocation of resources.

The development of an Access software based management information system has been invaluable in quality assuring collected data, and this will be readily available to the national web-based system when it is operational. Data is reported to the Programme Manager on a regular basis and is routinely used in informing planning decisions.

The programme is currently in a transitional phase in undertaking reviews of services at the local partnership group (LPG) level against emerging trends and further strategic effort will be required to ensure that LPG’s are fully informed about the need to balance local aspiration against a greater focus on outcomes especially where medium term planning has taken place to support projects on an on-going basis.

To date, there are limited examples of services and projects that have been mainstreamed on basis of performance data, not least because projects are still in mid-life in most cases. However, much attention is now being focussed in this area and budget adjustments are now adding impetus to the process. An annual work report and plan will relate progress across Partnership activity from April 2005.