Sheffield Controlling Migration Fund Project

Summary

Sheffield was successful in gaining government funding of £835,000 from the Controlling Migration Fund in late 2017. Sheffield City Council is the lead partner. The funding is to fund a 2 year community development project in the NE and E of the city to tackle the impacts of recent migration. Part of this funding is to evaluate our work and our learning from the project as it develops and delivers during 2018 and 2019.

Evaluation Requirements

We want to use the evaluation funding to find a suitable academic organisation to be able to work with us to design an appropriate evaluation of this project from the start, during and afterwards. This means assisting us with the initial baseline measures to ensure we have robust baseline measures in place and also involves some monitoring during the project to ensure we collect suitable data along the way as well as a final evaluation writing a critique of the project at its conclusion.

We will work with the successful evaluator to establish an independent and robust evaluation framework from the start of the project, with the opportunity for some smaller, interim assessments over the 2 years. We are aware that the baseline figures and success measures in our bid for CMF, outlined below, are open to critique and so we are looking for help in ensuring that these are appropriate and effective for measuring the success of our project.

We will utilise the community development workers funded from this project to collect baseline data and undertake community mapping as part of their induction/training, this would be the resource offer from the Council.

We expect the evaluation to include

• interviews with new and existing residents
• perspectives of key service providers
• cost/benefit (or social return on investment) analysis of the money invested via the bid compared to the savings through reduced demand on services
• assessment of the prevented demand on key services (eg. enforcement; legal proceedings etc etc)
• wider socio-economic outcomes through surveys (eg. number of new migrants in work etc)
• evidence to populate our Impact Summary return for MHCLG

We would value working with an organisation that can bring previous experience of similar work to enable us to compare our approach with that of other places in the UK.