As the What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care grows, we plan to fund an increasing number of local authorities (and other organisations) to deliver initiatives which aim to improve outcomes for children, young people and their families.

We’re excited to support new interventions – but perhaps even more than this – we’re excited to be able to provide high quality evidence on whether these interventions are actually achieving the impact they set out to.

Our own research team will be running a small number of evaluations –  for example, of the Department for Education’s Strengthening Families, Protecting Children Programme –  but to deliver the breadth of evaluations that we hope to over the coming years, we need other organisations to help design and run evaluations in children’s social care.

The Centre is therefore seeking to recruit a diverse set of organisations to join its Panel of Evaluators which will collectively be able to demonstrate a wide range of interests and expertise in the evaluation of children’s social care programmes and interventions.

Individual organisations will not be expected to work in all of these methodologies, however the Panel will ideally reflect all of the following:

●   Impact evaluation in children’s social care, education or Local Government

●   Randomised controlled trial design and analysis

●   Implementation and process evaluation

●   Primary data collection

●   Quasi-experimental methods, including difference in differences

●   Measurement, instrument development and validation, and psychometrics

●      Economic evaluation

We expect to fund evaluations with values ranging from £25k to over £100k. More information on how to apply, what is expected of evaluators, in addition to how we expect to run the Panel is available in the Open Call document here.

Deadline for submissions: 12PM Monday, May 13th, 2019

If you have any questions about this, please contact louise.reid@nesta.org.uk.