You’ve probably heard of Monitoring and Evaluation. You might even have groaned when you’ve heard the phrase ‘M&E’. Monitoring and Evaluation is – understandably – not a priority for many organisations, especially those who are short staffed or facing financial pressures. Very few people find it as interesting as me and my team. But here’s why M&E is so important to the work that we do here at Active Essex: when Monitoring and Evaluation feeds in to learning, it contributes to evidence-based action that benefits the residents of Greater Essex.
Essentially, M&E involves gathering data about a programme, project or policy and analysing this to assess its effectiveness. For example, Active Essex Foundation collected information about the young people referred through three referral pathways created between system partners and community sports organisations. Analysing this data allowed us to evaluate the intervention: the data showed that a high proportion of young people who were NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) were referred through the pathways, suggesting that the intervention had successfully reached its target audience.
Another way we use M&E is to track progress. Recently, our Intelligence Manager Amelia has been working with Active Essex’s Senior Leadership Team to agree on a set of short- and longer-term outcomes that will serve as our guiding lights as we embark on the next phase of our Sport England funded Place Partnership work. Our monitoring and evaluation activity will measure the progress we’re making towards these outcomes.
But M&E is just part of the place-based working puzzle, and it’s important that it’s combined with learning. In fact, you might often hear us talking about Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) these days. Without learning, monitoring and evaluation is unlikely to contribute to real change. Monitoring is meaningless if we don’t spend time reflecting on what trends are telling us, and even the most carefully researched and beautifully presented evaluation report is useless if it never gets read.
Learning: an important piece of the place-based working puzzle
As highlighted in our last reflection blog, we pay close attention to national-level monitoring, including the annual Active Lives Children and Young People Survey. We’re also building a learning culture that encourages the team to spend time reflecting, learning and challenging ourselves. We’ll know that we’ve really succeeded in building that culture when we have well-established cycles of learning and action, not just within our organisation but across Greater Essex.
‘Cycles of learning and action’ is a term I’m borrowing from Sport England’s National Evaluation and Learning Partnership (NELP). It’s one of nine conditions for place-based working that have emerged from NELP’s work with Place Partnerships, including Active Essex. NELP defines cycles of learning and action as being present when ‘there are appropriate methods in place to learn from experience and, over time, improve place-based working to address physical inactivity.’
This definition of cycles of learning and action positions MEL as an active, collaborative, localised, and ongoing journey: it’s not something that can be ticked off at the end of a project, or something that is done by a team of researchers far away from the project. It’s work that we do together, and work that interacts with the other conditions for place-based working to address inequalities. Work by NELP suggests, for example, that when a place has effective capture and use of data and insight and local partners invest in building capacity and capability for place-based systemic working, then there is a higher likelihood of community-led action that meaningfully involves people with lived experience in developing physical activity initiatives.
When we put MEL to work in cycles of learning and action, it can support us to:
- adjust projects so that they serve our communities better
- make evidence-based decisions
- allocate our resources in the right ways
- plan for the future, and
- convince others of the power of place-based work.
There are encouraging signs of cycles of learning to action in our work. For example, changes have been made to our Essex ActivAte Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) programme in line with what the data has told the team. Survey responses from children who attend Essex ActivAte holiday clubs and their parents highlighted the importance of the programme’s food offer, so the team put more resource into this part of the work, creating resources, providing training, and offering food hampers (among other things). Following insight from external evaluation work by Sporting People, the HAF team are helping organisations to achieve greater sustainability with a suite of organisational development support. Finally, the team used a Social Impact valuation produced by Substance – which estimated the social value of the Easter 2024 HAF provision at almost £4.5million – to influence political figures both locally and nationally.
Establishing effective cycles of learning to action sometimes means acknowledging what hasn’t worked well, as well as celebrating what has. It means embracing a range of methods to generate rich insight, from simple surveys that tell us about physical activity levels to more creative methods such as photovoice to help us understand residents’ perspectives. It means carving out space for MEL at every phase of place-based working, from planning and pilot projects, through delivery, to post-delivery reflection and expansion and replication.
While Monitoring Evaluation & Learning provides us with valuable insights, the true measure of our success lies in how we leverage these insights and collaboratively feed them into our cycles of learning and action.
Links to learn more:
- NELP’s cross-cutting conditions that may be necessary for place-based approaches to address inequalities: https://evaluatingcomplexity.org/resources/conditions-for-tackling-inequalities-in-physical-activity
- AEF Sport and Life Skills report: https://www.activeessexfoundation.org/media/Sport-and-Life-Skills-AEF-Report-2024-Oct-Version_compressed.pdf
- HAF reports: https://data.essex.gov.uk/dataset/2ylx8/evaluation-of-essex-activate-haf
