The Art of Evaluation: In-House and In-Partnership in Doncaster

Inspiring Leaders, Creative Learners was a programme of teacher development with darts, Doncaster’s leading creative health and learning charity, and the Rose Learning Trust’s nine primary schools in and around Doncaster. We focused on building creative practice in the classroom to empower teachers while making the curriculum more accessible.

darts and Town Field Primary School led the evaluation process with support from TDF evaluation consultant, Dr Vicky Storey, and critical friend, Elaine Burke. darts has previously collaborated with academic partners on evaluation, but this was an opportunity to upskill internally and build confidence with in-house evaluation techniques. At Town Field and the Trust, evaluation and reflection are central pillars to the school improvement planning process, but the focus on evaluating an arts programme was something new.

We gathered evaluation data through a range of approaches, both qualitative and quantitative: interviews with stakeholders, creative activities during professional learning days, and termly surveys where teachers reflected on specific students’ experiences and their creative habits.

The successes of our evaluation process were rooted in the TDF model and how reflective we were encouraged to be; we felt we could experiment, make mistakes, try out new things and then follow what we learnt in our schools. It’s easy to feel that funders need to hear the most positive case studies and statistics, but early TDF events encouraged us to enquire and experiment throughout the programme. Our challenges were around creating and maintaining a shared language for all our stakeholders, so that everyone understood what we were evaluating and why. We spent time exploring and agreeing terminology and impact aims directly with teachers and this paid off: six months in, teachers seemed to understand and invest more in the evaluation and at the same time, the percentage of reflection forms completed increased from 68% to 82%.

We learnt to prioritise analysing data during every school holiday; through this, we could respond to smaller trends as they emerged. This schedule allowed us to share learning regularly with our evaluation consultant, who then helped us access appropriate academic papers which resonated with our work.

When approaching evaluation in the future, at darts, we intend to gather less, more carefully selected data in response to more focused and deeper areas of enquiry and impact. The most pertinent research emerged by engaging key stakeholders in action research, focusing on relevant enquiry areas and outcomes: teachers’ reflections on their students’ development, Heads’ understanding of changes to school culture and artists supporting teachers’ reflection and development. Our most successful evaluation tool was our creative practice, practical activities where teachers and artists reflected on their process. Here, we saw connections from across the programme and stakeholders were empowered to own their evaluation.

Sarah and Helena wrote up the final evaluation report together. At darts, these findings have informed our longer-term strategic planning and are regularly shared with partners and potential funders to highlight the impact of our work. Our team is more capable of leading evaluation, particularly in using enquiry-based approaches. Leaders at Town Field have reflected on their implementation processes and the value of partnership and collaboration. This has built confidence and resilience and has led to further joint evidence-based research projects in the arts.

Before the TDF project, we had relied on external evaluation for validation and the prospect of delivering evaluation in-house felt out of reach. 
 

We feel empowered to use these tools in the future to learn more about our work, highlighting how we can develop, build evidence and best serve our communities.