Executive Education Evaluation | Global

TERMS OF REFERENCE

Executive Education Evaluation | Global

Van Leer Foundation / 2024

Application Due: 29 March 2024

Timeline (ideal)

Start of inception phase: April 2024

Inception report: May 2024

Data collection phase: May-September 2024

Final report: October 2024

Budget

€80.000 – 100.000 EUR (any travel to be covered within budget)

Overview

About the Van Leer Foundation

Founded in 1949, the Van Leer Foundation (VLF) works worldwide to ensure that babies, toddlers and the people who care for them have a good start in life. Our mission is to improve opportunities for all young children, especially the millions of young children growing up in circumstances of social, economic and environmental disadvantage around the world.

We believe the major challenge is the transition to scale of support for babies, toddlers and those caring for them. By working together with governments, civil society, philanthropy, academia, international organisations and business, we find the best programmes and policies to improve children’s lives. We partner with them by providing funding, expertise, networks and support to scale these up for maximum impact.

Geographically, our investments are made in focus countries, selected to reflect global diversity in economic, geographic and cultural terms, and a global programme through which we engage strategic replication partnerships that span multiple countries, in some cases extending beyond our core set of countries.

Executive Education

One of the core programmatic pieces of work VLF undertakes is the facilitation of Executive Education courses for government officials and early childhood development practitioners. Since 2015 we have developed and delivered three core courses:

Leading and Scaling Early Childhood Initiatives delivered with the John F. Kennedy School of Government Harvard University. This in-person course ran for five consecutive years from 2015 2022, with a 2 year hiatus due to COVID. The programme was designed to support teams of policy-makers, business leaders, government officials, and foundation leaders who had senior responsibility for allocating resources and making direct investments in early childhood development on a significant scale. These investments were in policies, infrastructure, and social services that affect children’s health, nutrition, learning, and protection. Family support programmes and innovations in urban planning that improve child development outcomes were the focus of the course, as many of the participants were working to scale up ideas in these two categories in their home countries. Some more information here.

Urban95 Academy delivered with the London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE). This course was launched in 2020 to make available Urban95 knowledge to cities worldwide and train municipal teams on how to embed an early childhood lens into urban planning and design. City teams can apply to a 6-week online course. Based on their performance in the online course, LSE invites a subset of cities to a residency week of in-person training at its London campus. The programme has successfully run 5 cohorts between 2020 and 2023 – and benefitted over 180 municipal teams through online training and 40 (of the 180) through an in-person residency week at LSE. We recently renewed our investment in this course for an additional 3-year phase to reach an additional 300 cities. More details can be read here: https://www.urban95academy.org/

ABC for ECD delivered with Save the Children’s CUBIC, BVA Nudge Unit and INSEAD. Which has been running five cohorts since 2022 with a further two planned between 2024-2025. During each of the five in-person cohorts, teams of 3-5 people from ministries, city governments and technical partners learned about key behavioural concepts and how behavioural science tools and methods could be applied to early childhood programmes. They also finalised a signature project to execute after the 5-day training. Course faculty coached the teams as they implemented their projects over the next six months. At the end of the journey, teams reconvened online to share results and discuss challenges and successes. To date this means 35 teams from 19 countries have attended the course. Some information here.

Responsibilities

Overview

Now that our executive education courses have been running for several years we are eager to undertake an evaluation of their impact and successes. We have a range of anecdotal evidence of impact but would like to systematise this to better understand strengths and weaknesses to inform future course development.

Objectives

• Document the achievements/actions (relevant to course material) of the teams which have participated in the cohorts since completing the course
• Development of a clear definition of what is ‘success’ in the course (likely through development of a rubric) as defined by VLF objectives
• Asses overall contribution/impact of executive education course attendance to any (related) actions taken by attendees subsequently
• Identify what components of the course contribute to success/better outcomes
• Identify what characteristics make a team more or less likely to be successful in the course and inclined to taking action following the course
• Identify differences in any between VLF partner teams versus teams that are not linked to existing VLF partnerships
• Assess the 2 different models (competitive/funnel via a 2-step process/open to all versus nominating teams/one-step etc.) and their comparative effectiveness.
• Asses the role building networks (meaning the different countries/cities/types of professionals connecting) had in contributing to outcomes
• Provide recommendations to inform how any future executive education courses are developed and delivered.

Methodology

We are open to consultants proposing methodologies, however have a preference and keen interest in including a case-based realist evaluation approach wherein teams are treated as the cases to support our understanding of what makes a team successful. Methodology also needs to support the development of a definition, potentially a rubric, of success. Lastly, some outcome harvesting is presumed to be needed to assess overall contribution/impact.

It is expected that there will be a desk based review of various materials available (including recordings of course follow-up meetings) along with conducting interviews(virtually or in-person) with faculty teachers, teams across the cohorts and VLF staff members involved.

Outputs

• Detailed assessment methodology/matrix, and timeline
• Draft of final report findings, meeting to discuss (with presentation if relevant)
• A well-written final report and PPT
• A 1-2 page executive summary
• Any supporting data visualisation
• Any additional material including interview transcripts, collected data, workshop reports etc.

Qualifications

Education and work experience

Interested individuals and/or organisation should demonstrate their qualifications and proven experience in research, evaluation and writing.

Core skills

• Collaboration – Good interpersonal skills and ability to conduct interviews and establish and maintain effective working relations with Foundation colleagues and country-partners. We anticipate this to be an iterative process.
• Research – Ability to manage and synthesize large quantities of information and data and find key outcomes and processes in achieving these. Ability to conduct various research methodologies for thorough and candid conversation with project partners, service providers and families.
• Language – the core working language and the report will be in English, however, teams that have participated in the courses speak a range of languages with a high concentration speaking Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew. Speaking any of these languages would be a advantage, alternatively translation/interpretation plans need to be considered in proposed evaluation methodology.
• Organisation and result orientation – Ability to plan projects and activities, work to tight deadlines, and manage conflicting priorities to achieve a high-quality final product
• Visualisation knowledge – Ability to present sets of data or information for visual output is desirable.