Glossary

Since 2015 Better Start Bradford has provided services for expectant families and families with children aged 0-3 in Bowling and Barkerend, Bradford Moor and Little Horton, to help give children the best start in life.

BIRU was commissioned from 2019 – 2024 as a part of the Reducing Inequalities in Communities programme of work to enhance the evidence base of services delivered in RIC. The BIRU consisted of a collaboration between Born in Bradford (BiB), RIC and the University of York

Reducing inequalities in communities (RIC) are made up of the NHS, councils, care providers, and the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector. RIC make decisions about the use of health resources across Bradford District and Craven.

A data output specification is a way of organising and communicating the process of taking data you want from where it is stored into a place and format that allows you to use it for evaluation. Typically, it takes the form of a spread sheet that sets out the evaluation questions, the data required to answer them, the location of that data and the format that is needed with varying levels of complexity.

A contract between two or more organisations/bodies about why, how, when, and for what purposes they will share data. 

Data quality refers to how usable the available data is for your monitoring and evaluation (and any other intended purposes). Good data quality data is complete, accurate and valid. This means that you do not have high levels of missing data, that there are low numbers of errors in the data, and that the values in the data make sense (e.g. a date of birth sits within a realistic time frame). The data also need to be structured in a way that is can easily be extracted for your purposes. 

Foundations are the national What Works Centre for Children and Families. The vision is for children to have the foundational relationships that they need to thrive in life. The mission is to generate and champion actionable evidence to improve services for families, because this is one of the best ways to strengthen the relationships that make such a difference to children. Their focus is on children who need targeted support to address family-level risks, children experiencing harm and abuse in the home and children in care and care leavers.

Found in the Foundations Guide Book this summarises the level of evidence that can exist for early years services.

Community readiness examines the level to which a community is prepared to act on a particular issue. The readiness you measure needs to be focused on a very specific issue/concern. The community readiness model aims to give an approximation of the degree to which a community will engage with a service focused at targeting a specific issue of concern. 

The informed agreement of services user/staff/others for their data to be used and/or shared for evaluation purposes. 

The questions you want your evaluation process to answer.

Implementation evaluation answers the primary question, is this service being delivered as intended? It makes use of monitoring data and pulls it together to give a picture over a longer time period, going deeper, and asking more specific questions about the different parts of the service, which are not practical to examine within the frequency of a monitoring process. It is good to see implementation evaluation as directly being linked to the service’s logic model as it will examine the degree to which the inputs, activities, and outputs columns of the logic model are working in practice.