Yorkshire Forward, the Regional Development Agency for Yorkshire and the Humber has recently appointed Regeneris to prepare the framework for evaluating projects under their Policy Product Range (PPR) structure.
This covers a range of projects from skills to employability, business creation to low carbon businesses and urban and rural regeneration to marketing the region, and comprises the majority of all Yorkshire Forward funding.
The structure of 12 Policy Product Ranges was set up in early 2008 and is a way for Yorkshire Forward to let their partners in the region know what they will and will not fund, as well as helping to give structure and clarity to their working. The evaluations need to be planned to allow them to assess the impact that each of their Policy Product Ranges is having. This can then help future investment decisions and demonstrate the impact that has been achieved. Our work on the framework for evaluations is split into three main stages.
The first stage involves analysing all investments and the project evaluations that are already planned. Yorkshire Forward is required to ensure that project spend is robustly evaluated (complying with the Impact Evaluation Framework) and that this includes good coverage across different types of project. We will assess whether the quantity and range of planned evaluations meets the requirements, and our work will support Yorkshire Forward in developing their evaluation plan for the coming years.
In the second stage we are developing logic models for each Policy Product Range. These models are designed to show the logical steps between the strategic need for interventions in that policy area, the reasons why Yorkshire Forward should invest, the objectives for investing, the types of activities funded, the types of outputs that are produced, and the impacts that this has in the region. This logical step-by-step model will help to further clarify the remit of each Policy Product Range and will help to show the way in which projects under each PPR should be evaluated.
The third stage will then bring together our work as we produce the overall framework for evaluation. This will include the approach to evaluating projects under each Policy Product Range and the ways in which these individual project and programme evaluations can be brought together to show the impact of each PPR, and the impact of funding under all PPRs combined.
For more information on our evaluation services, please contact Simon Hooton, Director in our Manchester office, on 0161 926 1832.
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