Overview

Realising Ambition is a UK wide £25million Big Lottery Fund programme replicating 25 interventions aimed at preventing children and young people from entering the criminal justice system. Substance is working with the Realising Ambition consortium partners, Catch 22, the Young Foundation and Social Research Unit at Dartington, to report the outcomes and likely impact of a programme of national and international significance.

The Challenge

The five year programme is funding organisations to deliver evidence based and promising interventions in order to improve the understanding of what works, promote learning and help commissioners to make smarter investment decisions. The challenge for Realising Ambition was to collect good quality information about the 130,000 beneficiaries involved in projects, record their attendance, eligibility criteria and retention rates and report the personal outcomes that were being achieved.

How we helped

Each of the organisations delivering the programme were supported to use Views through face to face training, webinars and ongoing telephone and email support. Substance built bespoke clusters of questionnaires for each organisation to administer online which records the progress of beneficiaries. Information on the types of work being delivered to children and young people was recorded, including in large scale universal interventions where a sampling methodology was designed and deployed. Realising Ambition organisations designed and published an accurate record of their achievements through the Views Report module.

Realising Ambition organisations are now able to analyse and reflect on their own progress and report on the outcomes and likely impact of their prevention and early intervention work, increasing the chance of securing new funding and commissions for further replication throughout the UK.