14 November, 2019

We are delighted to share our impact highlights from the last year. We're proud of the results which show the strength and skills of the children we work with and their dedication to achieving their goals. By increasing their emotional wellbeing, attitude towards relationships, confidence and attainment, we are also having a positive impact on the schools, communities and families around them as well.  

We have come a long way in the last 5 years and we're pleased to be able to add the boroughs of Brent and Westminster to our partnership this September, ensuring that we can continue expanding within our Zone. 

In summer 2019, our second cohort of children finished their two-year WLZ programmes. This was a large cohort with almost 300 children finishing and as a group their progress according to the WLZ outcomes framework was an improvement on the smaller group who finished in 2018. This shows that the continual refinements we are making to our programme are achieving better and better outcomes for children. As this was the first large group to finish the full 2-year programme, these results set a benchmark for future years.

Results Against the West London Zone Outcomes Framework

Nearly 300 children finished their two-year programmes in summer 2019. The following results show their improvement against the West London Zone outcomes framework.

Wellbeing Outcomes

Our first three outcome areas address the issues in a child’s life that can result in poor wellbeing. In these outcome areas we aim for children to cross a threshold so they are no longer at risk, although demonstrating improvement but not managing to cross the threshold is also a positive change that will help move them towards an improved trajectory into adulthood. 

The charts represent the children who were at risk in each outcome area at the start of the programme, and the proportion of whom either improved (shaded fill) or additionally crossed the threshold to no longer be at risk (solid fill).

Attainment Outcomes

Our fourth outcome area is school attainment, which we split between English (or reading at primary age) and maths. For this outcome, ‘improvement’ shows children who have made above expected progress, meaning that during their WLZ programme their academic trajectory improved.

These charts represent the children who were at risk at the start of the programme, and the proportion whose trajectory improved.

Our Approach to Impact

Over the long term, we aim to change the narrative for an entire generation of young people in need, and so that we can track that over time we set ourselves up from the beginning to measure and demonstrate the impact on every single child we work with, one child at a time.

We believe that to provide all of the support a child needs, we must provide a complete package to help build their skills and strengths. We work to four key outcome areas in our results which we believe will do this.

We collect data daily on how children are engaging with the programme; whether they are spending time with their Link Worker, attending specialist delivery partner and/or Link Worker support sessions, and fully interacting in those sessions. We also collect regular data from children, families, schools and partners about how the children are progressing, and regular feedback on how the children are feeling about the programme.

Results Against our Outcomes-Based Contract

We have outcomes-based contracts with local government, topped up by the National Community Lottery Fund and DCMS’s ‘Life Chances Fund’, which require us to achieve milestones for individual, specified children on our cohort before we are paid.

The milestones are:

• children signing up to the programme,
• engaging successfully with the programme, and
• achieving a range of progress outcomes that fit within our overall WLZ outcomes framework explained above.

The following chart shows that Cohort 2 outperformed against our ‘base case’ targets in our contracts.

Notes:

We can claim up to 3 outcomes payments per named child. We claimed 76% of the total possible outcomes payments for the children who completed the full 2-year programme (shaded pink bar). When we take into account children who left before we measured final outcomes, this reduces to 62% of total possible outcomes (solid pink bar).

Cohort 2 experienced a higher than predicted dropout rate, in part due to data arrangements required by GDPR. This issue has been addressed for cohort 3, which has a significantly lower projected dropout rate.

What Next?

Our focus for the coming year will be to continue delivering quality support and providing opportunities for WLZ children against the outcomes framework, analysing and interpreting our data on an ongoing basis so that we can keep improving our programme design and delivery all the time. Now we have a baseline, we will aim to improve against these results in coming years.

As of September 2019, we are working with 880 children in 25 schools across Hammersmith & Fulham, Kensington & Chelsea, Brent and Westminster, and will continue to grow the number of children on our programme until we are deep within the Zone.