I am almost at the end of creating a huge document listing the learning from Time to Shine – it’s currently having some design magic performed on it which I hope will make it easier for anyone interested to find the information they need to help them improve their own practise (surely that’s all of you?). As I have worked my way round the website, checking links and looking at documents, I have impressed both myself and my colleagues with the breadth and depth of what we learned.
I particularly enjoyed a comment from Lisa – our Monitoring and Evaluation officer, who told me she’d opened the Monitoring and Evaluation toolkit because she was curious, only to find she’d written it – then, in the white heat of this year with Enhance, had completely forgotten! It’s an excellent toolkit. The learning that we’ve been able to put into place so far in monitoring Enhance has led to some very happy comments from delivery partners who find the systems and documents easy to use.
I will be writing a number of blogs over the next few months highlighting some of my top picks. This is my starting point:
Time to Shine local evaluation: Report 10: Test and learn: understanding the experiences and challenges of frontline organisations. This is the final document in the series produced by our local evaluation partners, the Centre for Loneliness Studies at Sheffield University.
This report focuses on the test and learn aspects of the projects as delivery partners worked with older people, it “highlights common themes and reflections and offers insight into life ‘on the ground’ … It presents the findings from the Test and Learn case studies of a very diverse group of delivery partners … focused on sharing their insight and identifying ways in which this learning could influence future practice.”
Test and learn continues to resonate with LOPF, as the Enhance programme is now in full swing, while managers are in the middle of writing funding bids for year two. We’re trying to wring every last drop of learning from this first six months to help us plan, with Leeds Community Healthcare (LCH), for better ways of achieving what we all want from year two of the programme. Partners are collecting information about what is working, and talking to each other, and to LCH, about things that could work better.
The report also underlines the importance of co-production throughout. It was written by LOPF board member and retired academic researcher, Jean Townsend, who was involved with Time to Shine from the start. Jean played a large part in pulling together the original Lottery bid and was then a member of the Core Partnership and Evaluation sub-group. It was entirely appropriate that she should put her skills and experience to use on the final evaluation. Her report is interesting, informative and a really good read.
You can find all ten Time to Shine local evaluation reports, which cover topics as diverse as the impacts on individual beneficiaries as well as big picture issues of systems change and sustainability. Go to the Resources section of the website and type (in ‘Search resources’) ‘Time to Shine Local Evaluation’ and they will all appear.
.If you’re short of time there’s also an excellent summary.
Eventually there will be a huge list of everything… perhaps followed by a test to make sure you’ve read them!
Jessica Duffy
Good Practice Mentor