Evolve’s full name is Evolve: A Social Impact Company. Two of these words are central to the DNA of the multi-award-winning social enterprise:
- Evolve – we are always looking to improve and innovate
- Impact – we care about the results of our activities, not the activities themselves
Creating a bespoke online system to measure the impact of our Health Mentors in 2014 is an example of this. The Wellbeing Compass allowed us to identify pupils who needed our support. It also allowed us to track the effectiveness of our interventions with this cohort of mentees.
As well as a key tool used by Health Mentors, the Wellbeing Compass has also been used by local authorities and multi-academy trusts as a standalone service that compliments their pastoral offer to pupils and teachers. The data captured by the Wellbeing Compass has also been subject to numerous external evaluations from organisations such as UCLs’ Institute of Education, the Centre for Education and Youth, Simetrica and Leeds Beckett University.
However, the impact of Health Mentors on their mentees is much broader than their wellbeing alone. Feedback from teachers, parents and children themselves has consistently featured improvements in their mental health, mindset and school performance. These childhood development outcomes are included within our logic model but were not included within our impact tracking platform, until now.
The Wellbeing Compass has undergone significant development to become an even more useful tool for Evolve Health Mentors, its school partners and other stakeholders. From September 2024 onwards, the Wellbeing Compass will become the Evolve Development Tracker to better reflect the range of outcomes it covers.
The Evolve Development Tracker (EDT) is an online system for child centred schools to monitor essential youth development outcomes and unlock the needs, opportunities and potential of all pupils. It includes short surveys for pupils and staff to complete at various times of the year to highlight those in greatest need of additional support.
Key benefits of the EDT include:
- Showcasing wellbeing and pastoral outcomes to parents, governors, Ofsted and other stakeholders using simple intuitive charts.
- Accurately identifying children who need additional support to focus your resources more effectively.
- Diagnosing reasons why pupils may not be making academic progress and age related expectations using a range of relevant development outcomes.
- Justifying investments in wider educational and pastoral development programmes and interventions.
- Refining interventions based on impact data.
The fifth benefit in this list is a USP for this platform. Identifying needs and diagnosing challenges is the easy part. Being able to track the effectiveness of interventions to address these challenges is more difficult.
The EDT compares the progress of pupils receiving interventions with matched-peers who are not accessing the same additional support. This comparison data is far more reliable than tracking progress between the start and end of the intervention, where the absence of a demographically matched control group means that there is no way of knowing what would have happened to outcomes within the intervention or support programme.
A key feature of the EDT is its simplicity. After connecting it to school management information systems, the relevant surveys are selected and data collection time points are confirmed. Pupil account details can be shared using simple print outs and surveys are completed within short 10-20 mins timetable slots. There are even lesson plans provided in case teachers want to build survey completion into a PSHE lesson. The comprehensive data dashboards can be viewed at any time to compare mentees, pupils, classes and year groups.
The EDT is available for all Evolve clients as part of their Health Mentoring programme. However, we also have partnerships with local education authorities who offer the EDT to all of their schools as part of our support for Children in Need and Virtual School Headteachers.
In the coming weeks we will be sharing more information about the EDT and the six key childhood development domains that it supports: wellbeing, mental health, self efficacy, pupil performance, classroom climate, relationship quality.
To find out how you could benefit from integrating the Evolve Development Tracker into your provision, arrange to speak with an Evolve educational consultant for further information or to schedule a meeting by emailing impact@evolvesi.com.
