On the back of the publication of the Changemakers’ evaluation findings, we asked our evaluation partner Cordis Bright to tell us more about the key findings; the lessons for commissioning, designing and delivering local children’s services; and its important contribution to the evidence base.
Q: Cordis Bright led the evaluation of Foundations’ Changemakers programme for two years; can you tell us a bit about the ‘what, where, who, and why’ of the evaluation?
Cordis Bright: Changemakers was set up to tackle a problem that anyone working in children’s services will recognise. There are a growing number of evidence-based interventions (EBIs) that can make a real difference for children and families, but local areas often struggle to get them up and running and keep them going. Staff are stretched, there are lots of competing priorities and there’s rarely anyone whose job it is to focus on making implementation work.
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Foundations wanted to find out whether funding a dedicated Local Evidence Leader, or LEL, in four local authorities: Merton, Stockport, Wirral and York could help. The LELs had two jobs: The to lead the implementation of one or more EBIs locally;* and to help build a stronger culture of using evidence in local decision-making more generally. They were backed by Strategic Leads in their own councils, Practice Development Advisers from Foundations, and the EBI providers. So, Changemakers wasn’t an intervention in its own right. It was a model for getting evidence into practice, built around the interventions.
On our side, we were commissioned by Foundations to conduct an implementation and process evaluation, so we were interested in how the Changemakers model worked in practice, rather than measuring outcomes for children and families. We wanted to know whether it could be delivered as intended, what helped and what got in the way, what difference people felt the LEL made, and whether the role and the activities the LEL pursued were likely and whether any changes they made locally looked set to last once the funding ended.
* Resilience Triple P, Family Foundations, or Empowering Parents Empowering Communities (EPEC).
Q: Can you tell us about the key findings from the Changemakers evaluation – did any of them surprise you?
Cordis Bright: The headline is that having a dedicated evidence leadership role made a real difference. Practitioners were delivering these interventions on top of their regular roles. The LEL brought dedicated capacity to build links with referrers, as well as local schools and voluntary and community sector (VCS) organisations; liaise with EBI providers; sort out problems as they came up; and connect what was happening on the frontline with what senior leaders were deciding. People told us implementation would have been much harder without them.
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The clearest evidence was around implementing the specific interventions. There were some promising signs beyond that, too. People felt more confident questioning evidence and, in some local areas, new structures emerged, such as the Raise York Research Network and a parenting steering group in Merton, which can both continue even without an LEL in post. We saw much less evidence of wider, whole-system change but this isn’t surprising for a two-year programme.
A few things did surprise us. One was how much rested on relationships and local credibility. Knowing the evidence mattered, but being known and trusted in the local system often mattered just as much. Another was that the LEL couldn’t do it alone. Support from the EBI providers and Foundations’ Practice Development Advisers turned out to be far more central than the original theory of change suggested.
And we came to think that success shouldn’t necessarily mean adopting more evidence-based interventions in a local area. A Strategic Lead in one local area told us that without the LEL, they’d have bought an EBI and not understood why it wasn’t working. Being able to engage critically with evidence and judge whether something fits locally might be the more important outcome.
Q: What do you think the key lessons are for commissioning, design and delivery of children’s services?
Cordis Bright: The biggest one is to fund implementation, not just interventions. Choosing an EBI is the easier bit. Making it work needs people with the time to coordinate, build relationships, and solve problems as they come up, which needs to be budgeted for from the start rather than treated as an optional extra. In Changemakers, staffing was by far the largest cost in every area.
Second, look at readiness as well as need. An area might have a clear need for an intervention, but not yet have the workforce, leadership or partnerships to deliver it well. The areas that already had experience of EBI commissioning and delivery, strong partnerships, and senior leaders who backed the approach generally hit fewer barriers. Where that groundwork isn’t yet in place, it can make sense for local authorities to focus on building it first, and to allow more time than they think they’ll need.
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Third, plan for adaptation. Two of the three EBIs needed to be adapted to work locally, which often happened in response to problems that arose rather than by design….It helps for local authority commissioners and intervention providers to be clear from the outset about which parts of an intervention need to stay fixed and which can flex to fit local needs.
Fourth, senior local authority leaders should think carefully about who they put in implementation roles. Credibility and existing relationships mattered at least as much as technical expertise. In nearly all the Changemakers local areas, the people appointed were already known and trusted within their local Children’s Services departments, so they didn’t have to start relationship-building (and trust-building) from scratch.
Finally, build equity into the choice of intervention for your local area, not just the recruitment of families. If an intervention isn’t a good fit for the children and families you most need to reach, even really good implementation won’t fully make up for it.
Q: And finally, how has the evaluation of Changemakers contributed to the evidence on commissioning, design and delivery of children’s services?
Cordis Bright: We already know quite a lot from research about why implementation support, knowledge mobilisation, and system readiness matter. What’s been missing is evidence on how these things actually play out in local authority children’s services in England. Changemakers helps fill that gap. Our findings sit comfortably alongside the wider literature, but they give a practical picture of what dedicated implementation leadership looks like on the ground and what it needs around it to work.
That feels especially timely right now. Between the Families First Partnership Programme, the expansion of Family Hubs and the reforms set out in Stable Homes, Built on Love, there’s a big push towards earlier help, more joined-up local support, and using evidence to shape services. Changemakers gives a practical sense of what local authorities might need in place to turn those ambitions into reality on the ground.
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It has also changed how we think about Changemakers’ programme model. The original theory was fairly simple: put an LEL in place, they drive implementation activity, and that leads to better implementation and stronger evidence use. The evaluation broadly supports that, but the reality is more conditional. The LEL works best as part of a wider support system alongside Foundations’ Practice Development Advisers and EBI providers. How well it works depends on local leadership, capacity and readiness. And change tends to happen through relationships, adaptation and local learning. Better implementation can lay the foundations for wider evidence use, but it doesn’t automatically lead to it. These findings have fed into an updated theory of change for the programme.
There’s a methodological lesson in there too. Some of the most promising changes we saw, like growing confidence, new relationships and different ways of making decisions, are also the hardest to measure. We’re keen to keep working with other evaluators on what observable signs might show that a local system is getting better at using evidence, and whether that change is likely to stick.
There’s still plenty we don’t know. The big questions for future research are whether this kind of capability lasts once dedicated roles end, and whether stronger implementation leads to better outcomes for children and families.