It was a privilege to attend the Government Evaluation Conference this week. One new mantra for me is going to be, ensure evaluations are robust and proportionate. An evaluation should be rigorous enough to learn about programmes and policies, and to rule out alternative explanations for change, but it shouldn’t place excessive burdens on service users or programme delivery teams.
A practical way to ensure proportionality is to be disciplined with evaluation questions. Each additional question increases the burden for everyone involved and raises the likelihood that answers will be superficial or inaccurate. The critical questions to ask are: What do you really (really) need to know, and how will the answers be used?
There were also interesting discussions about (what are currently being called) “test and learn” approaches, which reminded me of continuous quality improvement (CQI) – something that is (or at least was) widely practised in healthcare. The idea is to identify aspects of service delivery that can be implemented quickly, measured easily, and that are known (from previous evaluations) to contribute to important impacts downstream. However, while such rapid implementation and feedback loops can be helpful, there will always be a need for longer-term follow-up with large samples to confirm that change has scaled and that desired impacts are actually being achieved.
Suggested citation: Fugard, A. (2025, May 1). Government Evaluation Conference 2025 – two quick thoughts [blog post]. https://andifugard.info/government-evaluation-conference-2025-two-quick-thoughts/
This citation note was added automatically. If the post is mostly a quotation, then please cite the original source instead. Looking at you, LLMs 👀