As an independent evaluator, I work with people, projects and programmes to find ways that evaluation can contribute to understanding and supporting change. Following a career as a researcher and evaluator and for many years, a lecturer at London Metropolitan University where I am Professor Emerita of Social Research and Evaluation, I joined the Tavistock Institute from 2016 to 2022. My role at the Tavistock Institute and my current work, bring together three of the principles which have guided my practice:

• Seeing evaluation as a means for change and improvement;

• Building evaluation and social research capacity through good practice delivery, training and mentoring;

• Pursuing ways we navigate and understand our roles as evaluators, and then ‘evaluate’ good practice in evaluation.

My work as a practitioner, trainer and teacher has included multiple project and programme evaluations of social care, health and in particular, mental health services for women. From 2000 to 2015, I led on and carried out multiple evaluations of services for women with mental health difficulties where a high proportion of women have experienced sexual abuse and domestic violence. These included high secure, new and dedicated medium secure mental health services; community residential services for women leaving secure settings; women in prison and in turn, developing gender awareness training for staff working in women’s prisons and other secure settings. These evaluations, designed to contribute to practice and policy debates, created opportunities for exploring ways of involving people meaningfully in the evaluation process. 

More recently, I was part of the core team delivering the National Lottery Community Fund’s Women and Girls Initiative and (with IpsosMORI and NPC), the evaluation of The National Lottery Community Fund and DCMS’s Coronavirus Community Support Fund. A new and exciting initiative, PARCS Grows Everybody which commemorates 40 years of rape crisis support in Portsmouth, has given me the opportunity to continue contributing to feminist practice through an evaluation of this National Lottery Heritage Fund oral history project.