Maybe and yes!
ReachOut is already recognised for its approach to impact measurement: we track attainment and outcomes for the young people that we work with - attainment measures are a good hard external measure of achievement, and whether a student has gone on to work, training or employment is a good proxy for good judgement and character strength.
But we want to be recognised as the leading national charity focused on the character development of young people. This means we need to dig deeper - look at what we do, and find out how each aspect of it contributes to our outcomes so that we can ensure that our intervention has the maximum effect every time.
This evaluation will impact on everything we do – how we recruit, train and develop our staff, how we recruit, train and support our mentors, how programmes are structured, the character curriculum and how we deliver it, the focus on homework and also how we structure the club activities. It will help us to build the expertise and skills of every person in the organisation in order to deliver the best for our young people.
How will we do this? Collaboration is the key
We are collaborating with other charities, academics and measurement experts. We want to be a leader in an educational movement that raises the importance of character development in all schools – regardless of whether we are working with them directly. To do this we’ve worked closely with the Jubilee Centre of Character and Virtue who are doing some ground-breaking studies that demonstrate the importance of character in education and in the wider world; we’ve become part of the Fair Education Alliance so are working alongside organisations like Teach First and Save the Children to demonstrate the importance of character, wellbeing and social emotional skills in tacking educational disadvantage; we are being advised by the Education Endowment Foundation on evidence – they are a real centre of expertise in this and have been really generous with their time in helping us find the right measures to kick off this process. We are big fans of using existing measures and building up a body of knowledge across the UK – which is their objective too so we’ve got a lot in common. And finally – we are working closely with the Department for Education – advising them on character and feeding in our knowledge and experience to help them achieve our shared aim of embedding character education into all schools.
This February, we are on the cusp of piloting our first character measurement survey developed with the support of the Education Endowment Foundation. This survey will be a huge step towards helping us to track the development of character, and help us make good on our promise of supporting young people to reach their full potential. Exciting times for us and for character education as a whole!
We will keep you updated on how we get on.
Alison Braybrooks
Director of Fundraising and Impact
London
ReachOut is already recognised for its approach to impact measurement: we track attainment and outcomes for the young people that we work with - attainment measures are a good hard external measure of achievement, and whether a student has gone on to work, training or employment is a good proxy for good judgement and character strength.
But we want to be recognised as the leading national charity focused on the character development of young people. This means we need to dig deeper - look at what we do, and find out how each aspect of it contributes to our outcomes so that we can ensure that our intervention has the maximum effect every time.This evaluation will impact on everything we do – how we recruit, train and develop our staff, how we recruit, train and support our mentors, how programmes are structured, the character curriculum and how we deliver it, the focus on homework and also how we structure the club activities. It will help us to build the expertise and skills of every person in the organisation in order to deliver the best for our young people.
How will we do this? Collaboration is the key
We are collaborating with other charities, academics and measurement experts. We want to be a leader in an educational movement that raises the importance of character development in all schools – regardless of whether we are working with them directly. To do this we’ve worked closely with the Jubilee Centre of Character and Virtue who are doing some ground-breaking studies that demonstrate the importance of character in education and in the wider world; we’ve become part of the Fair Education Alliance so are working alongside organisations like Teach First and Save the Children to demonstrate the importance of character, wellbeing and social emotional skills in tacking educational disadvantage; we are being advised by the Education Endowment Foundation on evidence – they are a real centre of expertise in this and have been really generous with their time in helping us find the right measures to kick off this process. We are big fans of using existing measures and building up a body of knowledge across the UK – which is their objective too so we’ve got a lot in common. And finally – we are working closely with the Department for Education – advising them on character and feeding in our knowledge and experience to help them achieve our shared aim of embedding character education into all schools.
This February, we are on the cusp of piloting our first character measurement survey developed with the support of the Education Endowment Foundation. This survey will be a huge step towards helping us to track the development of character, and help us make good on our promise of supporting young people to reach their full potential. Exciting times for us and for character education as a whole! We will keep you updated on how we get on.
Alison Braybrooks
Director of Fundraising and Impact
London
No comments:
Post a Comment