On 19 March we celebrated and shared positive interim evaluation findings from the Changemakers programme at a hybrid event: ‘Local evidence leadership: Embedding and sustaining evidence use to drive change for children & families’.

Jointly funded by the Department for Education (DfE) and the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF), and part of the National Family Hubs programme, Changemakers aimed to bridge the gap between evidence and practice by promoting local evidence leadership in children’s services. The programme took place in Merton, Wirral, Stockport and City of York,starting in April 2024 and ending this month.

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Our Deputy Chief Executive, Donna Molloy, OBE, opened the morning webinar by outlining the aims of Changemakers, which were to:

• Explore the role of a Local Evidence Lead (LEL) as a lever to implement evidence and address barriers to evidence use
• Drive effective delivery and enhance family access to support, with the LEL working as a catalyst for change in local authorities and with local authority partners
• Fund, champion and facilitate the use of three evidence-based parenting interventions, selected from our Guidebook (Family Foundations; Triple P Resilience; Empowering Parents, Empowering Communities)
• Support the development of wider evidence literacy in strategic decision-making in each local authority, and a broader culture of evidence use.

Donna noted that national reforms to children’s services call for intentional, evidence-led local leadership. Foundations will continue to support local leaders through the current transformation, drawing on evidence-based interventions and new Practice Guides to help them deliver lasting change for children and families. She added that Foundations is using the learnings from Changemakers to scale and shape our new Evidence into Practice local offer. As part of this work, Foundations will put insights from Changemakers into action in nine local authorities across England.

Attendees also heard from speakers from partner organisations, including: Gail Gibbons (YEF); Chris Nickson (DfE); Louise Ashwell (Cordis Bright); Keith Billington (Wirral Council); Emma McDonaugh (Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council); Rob Newton (City of York Council); and Adam Warner (Merton Council).

Chris Nickson, Assistant Director of Best Start Family Hubs Funded Services Policy Unit at the DfE said: “We’re excited to learn from the full Changemakers evaluation. We’re going to be working with Foundations, colleagues, and others to share these lessons nationally across Best Start Family Hubs over the next few years. We want to improve our understanding of how the National Centre for Family Hubs can support better evidence use and adaptation of intervention and understand what more can we do to identify the key ingredients, and help to spread evidence-based practice locally and nationally The learning from Changemakers, and Foundations’ new Evidence into Practice local offer…it can all be an important part of the story going forward.”

Rob Newton, City of York’s LEL told attendees about an exciting strand of work that emerged through the Changemakers programme: “We’ve been working with Foundations to co-develop a framework for evidence use that’s designed to help local areas think about evidence holistically; not just the intervention itself, but the conditions that make it work. The framework is based on existing work from the Education Endowment Foundation and extensive and robust research evidence on implementation science.”

In the afternoon in-person session, Foundations, evaluation partner Cordis Bright , Local Evidence Leads, and strategic and operational leads from Changemakers local authorities reflected on the programme’s implementation process, discussed long-term sustainability of the Local Evidence Lead role, and identified final recommendations for the programme.

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To find out more about Changemakers, read the blog by Senior Practice Development Adviser, Jo Flanagan.