The Children’s Fund has raised the profile of preventive work and stimulated an important debate among agencies about what prevention means, according to early findings from a national evaluation of the Children’s Fund.
But most Children’s Fund programme managers found it unhelpful when the government announced that 25 per cent of the fund should focus on youth crime and crime reduction. They reported that the announcement caused "difficult changes" to Children’s Fund partnerships’ plans of work.
Children’s Fund partnership work was having a positive effect on other partnership-based developments locally, and because Children’s Fund partnerships were mapping children’s needs jointly, it was helping to build an understanding of the connections between different aspects of social exclusion.
But there were concerns that growth in the capacity of local voluntary sector groups, created as a result of the Children’s Fund, would not be sustained once the Children’s Fund money was withdrawn.
- The National Evaluation of the Children’s Fund: Early Messages from Developing Practice, K Morris and N Spicer, Birmingham university.
