The Big Lottery Fund’s (BIG) ‘Realising Ambition’ programme is a UK-wide initiative that will invest 25 million in outstanding projects that have proven their effectiveness in helping young people fulfil their potential and avoid the pathways into offending.

The programme will do this by helping to replicate the very best evidence based practice so that more children and young people receive the highest quality of service.

The Realising Ambition programme seeks to achieve the following outcomes:

• More children and young people benefit from opportunities and support to fulfil their potential, avoiding pathways into offending.
• Organisations working with children and young people have better evidence of what works in avoiding pathways into youth offending and are able to replicate the most effective approaches.
• The Big Lottery Fund and others learn about how they can best identify and support the replication of proven practice.

The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (TIHR) will be undertaking the process evaluation of the Realising Ambition programme. The process evaluation will explore what does and doesn’t work when supporting organisations to replicate proven interventions and the resources required to support different approaches to replication. This will include data on the nature of support required, costs attached to support and different replication approaches and issues emerging for organisations involved in replication. Indicators will be developed that can be used to measure the projects’ replication journey during the two years of the study.

Our approach to this evaluation is built on the following principles:

• Theory of change perspective: seeking to identify the explicit and implicit paradigm of change/ interventions logic that lies at the heart of the programme.
• A case study approach: a number of case studies will be undertaken to explore in depth the projects’ processes, barriers and helpers to replicating.
• Triangulation: collecting and analysing secondary and primary data and quantitative and qualitative data to provide robust evidence of the project’s journeys.
• Collaboration: the importance of evaluation as a negotiated, collaborative process with the funder and stakeholders.

The evaluation team includes:

Project Director: Kerstin Junge. K.Junge@tavinstitute.org
Researchers: David Drabble and Giorgia Iacopini.
Principle Researchers: Joe Cullen, Judy Corlyon and Camilla Child.