The Blagrave Trust was one of a number of funders involved in the Alexi project – a recent large-scale evaluation of the impact of service delivery on improving local responses for children at risk or victims of child sexual exploitation (CSE).
Large scale, longitudinal data provided a complex and rich picture of the state of specialist service
provision across England.
One of the key findings was that CSE services struggled to evidence ‘top-level’ outcomes, because of
a range of challenges around impact measurement. Researchers found that predetermined
and generalised sets of outcomes are unlikely to capture the range of needs of individual children, and
as a result these outcome sets do not tell us enough about the lives of service users, or take enough account of
their perspectives.
The findings throw up important questions about the usefulness and applicability of a standardised approach to outcomes measurement in service delivery, for all those working with young people.