Evidence, monitoring and evaluation

Building evidence

Their Futures Matter is working collaboratively with partner agencies and non-government organisations to design practical and effective solutions to improve individual outcomes for vulnerable children and families.

Using the best available evidence from government agencies, the service sector and academic literature, we are able to identify:

• what solutions have demonstrated success
• where more evidence is needed
• service solutions that need to be designed to support vulnerable children, young people, and families.

For example, our Aboriginal Evidence Building in Partnership Project is building the local evidence base for Aboriginal programs in NSW. Our aim is to work with our community partners to develop a stronger evidence base of programs and services that work best for Aboriginal children, young people, families, and communities.

Monitoring and evaluation

A comprehensive monitoring and evaluation framework is used to identify the best-practice data collection required to measure benefits and evaluate outcomes consistently across service solutions. Streamlining and standardising outcome measures allows changes in client outcomes to be assessed both within and across programs.

We have also made a commitment to ensure the process, outcome and economic components of our evaluations are assessed using the most rigorous and robust research methodologies available.

We use the NSW Human Services Outcomes Framework as our guiding framework to ensure consistency in outcomes measurement across NSW agencies. This framework enables us to take a client centric view to identify the effectiveness of programs to ensure we make a positive long-term difference to people’s lives.