Enhancing Parliamentary Evaluation of Democratic Engagement Programmes

This project evaluated the methods and systems that the UK Parliament Education and Engagement service currently utilises to understand the effectiveness and impact of their democratic engagement programmes. The current methods and systems are perceived to be superficial and fragmented, hindering the service’s ability to evaluate and enhance their programmes. Co-designed with the service staff, the project will help the team to develop the evaluation tools and protocols used across the different programmes, to make them better aligned, more purposeful and better suited to different types of audiences (e.g., young people, disabled people, Black and ethnic minorities etc). The project analysed in detail the service’s current practice and explored the purposes of evaluating across the service and the institution more generally of the UK Parliament. The team shared and discussed interim findings with service staff, before co-producing a report with evidence-based recommendations. Due to the participatory nature of the project, it has a high chance of delivering societal impact in the short term and the future. Ultimately, the insights gained should help the service to enhance the provision of democratic engagement programmes and address declining levels of trust.

 

Project aims

The key objectives for this project are to: 

• Undertake a mapping exercise of how programmes are currently evaluated; this will be done through interviews and documentary analysis;  
• Understand how evaluation is done in practice, through the observation of sessions actually delivering a range of different democratic engagement programmes;
• Understand the purposes of evaluating, through interviews with individual staff;  
• Identify opportunities to enhance current evaluation practice, through the analysis of the data collated through fieldwork.