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HEFCE Evaluation Capacity Building in Widening Participation Practice

HEFCE commissioned CSET (now part of the Higher Education Research and Evaluation Centre) and REAP (Researching Equity Access and Participation) in the Department of Educational Research at Lancaster University to undertake evaluation capacity building in widening participation. Following a successful pilot project in Summer 2007, the CSET / REAP team delivered a programme of capacity building workshops, eight targeted consultancies and producted a resource toolkit to support evaluation planning and development.  More information can be as follows:

Pilot Project

During the summer 2007 we conducted a pilot project working with four HEIs to support them in developing their evaluation plan.  Findings from the pilot were used to inform the development of the full project.

Full Project

• Three introductory workshops in London, Birmingham, and Manchester (January and February 2008). 
• Six HEI and two Aimhigher Partnership consultancies
• Development of a tool kit of resources to support evaluation planning
• Three follow up workshops in London, Derby and Manchester (June 2008)

Why develop an evaluation plan?

Often, evaluations of complex interventions involve collaborations between many stakeholders to identify key questions. The results of evaluations can help stakeholders in HEIs, to:

• find short-term, provisional, creative solutions to the problems produced by change. 
• they can help us to think more clearly about complex problems and act as a 'bridging tool' to enable planning and decisions for future action.  We might capture this process as 'creating provisional stabilities'. 
• uncover evidence, narratives, vignettes and cases about how interventions are being experienced,
• can provide enough knowledge for onward planning,
• manage a rapidly evolving change, in which evaluation knowledge is provisional, but stable enough for us to make some sense of what we see around us.

This capacity building project introduced colleagues, with responsibility for developing an evaluation plan for HEFCE (July 2008) and themselves, to a process that led towards the production of an evaluation plan that was practical and reflected the HEI or Aimhigher Partnerships priorities and interests.