Evaluation Organisations to support the evaluation of the Children's Social Care Innovation Programme / Partners in Practice

The Department for Education (DfE) proposes to tender for the services of up to 18 organisations to undertake evaluations as part of the Children's Social Care Innovation Programme (IP) and Partners in Practice (PiP).

Evaluations will be thematically focused, looking at a group of projects and testing a number of hypotheses under headline themes.

Programme wide evaluation will be overseen by an evaluation coordinator (a separate PIN will be published for this work).

We intend to publish this opportunity through the Education & Children's Social Care Dynamic Purchasing System (DPS) via the Redimo 2 e-procurement system on Monday 5 December 2016.

See below for more information regarding the e-procurement system.

Background The Innovation Programme was launched in October 2013 to act as a catalyst for developing more effective ways of supporting vulnerable children.

In its first two years the IP has supported 53 projects with £110m, operating across 59% of all top tier local authorities and involving over 120 public, private and voluntary sector organisations.

Partners in Practice initiative, initially agreed by the child protection taskforce, and announced by the Prime Minister in December 2015 will model excellence and innovation in the delivery of children's social care services.

Evaluation Evaluation is a core component of the IP.

We need to undertake high quality evaluations and produce compelling and accessible outputs for practitioners, commissioners and service leaders.

The evaluation strategy consists of: - an evaluation coordinator primarily responsible for setting and assuring high evaluation standards, overseeing project evaluations, and bringing together data from project evaluations to demonstrate progress towards the Innovation Programme objectives; and - individual evaluation organisations allocated to themes and ready to work with funded LAs and organisations to evaluate what works, why, and in what circumstances.

We expect to appoint evaluation organisations on a two-year contract, to run from January 2017 to January 2019 with flexibility to extend for a further two years.

Estimated Total Value (exc VAT): We expect total evaluation spend to be up to £4m for IP and up to £1m for PiPs.

Amounts allocated to the evaluation of particular themes will be dependent on the number of projects operating under the themes and the size of those projects.

See 'Attachments' for further information.