Evaluation of the CRS St Giles Wise (SGW) Womens Project

St Giles is seeking an experienced, flexible independent evaluator who can plan and deliver an evaluation of the Commissioned Rehabilitation Services (CRS) project.

We are excited to tender for this vital stage of our work, and want to hear from evaluators who share the ambitions, passion, and commitment of St Giles to drive systems-change through enabling people with lived experience of disadvantage to work at the heart of service design and delivery.

This evaluation will be pivotal to the future direction and success of the St Giles Wise (SGW) women’s services.

The St Giles Women’s services have been evaluated multiple times since it was first developed over 13 years ago. These evaluations have provided many kinds of evidence about the effectiveness and impact of our model and support for people experiencing complex and multiple disadvantages.

Over the past 22 months SGW have been delivering the CRS women’s provision across 6 regions across England. Delivering a holistic national model of support to women on probation, both in a custodial setting and the community.

We are working with the MOJ evaluation team to ensure that our evaluation dovetails the MOJ’s Impact, Process and Economic evaluation across the wider CRS provision.

We are seeking to build on and extend the understanding gathered from previous evaluations, to:

1. Develop a more robust and impactful evidence base about the role and value of our model in achieving longer-term impact for individuals, services for people facing disadvantage, and communities across the UK
2. Develop a better understanding of what works across different geographical locations e.g. Rural vs urban, and demographics.
3. Maximise learning from the evaluation to increase impact and to influence funders, commissioners, policy-makers, delivery partners, and future women involved in the criminal justice system, in particular:
   • understanding more about why aspects of our current approach work well or less well
   • including creative evaluation methods to assess and demonstrate the value of our model in improving engagement of services.

We are looking for an evaluator who:

• Is committed to the vision and values of St Giles Wise, understands the value of ‘lived experience’ approaches, including embedding peer-led research/evaluation
• Understands complex adaptive systems and how evaluation can help make sense of changes in this context, and make practical, action-focused recommendations
• Has experience of economic or return on investment analysis, and the ability to draw sound conclusions on value for money
• Is able to and has great networks we can learn from
• Has a track-record in producing engaging and creative outputs that create impact.

The results and outputs of this evaluation will play a critical role in future sustainability and development of our work to enable women involved in the criminal justice system to grow, develop, support themselves, families and communities.

We are excited to tender for this vital stage of our work and look forward to being able to award the contract to an experienced evaluation team that shares the ambitions, enthusiasm, passion and commitment to developing services which have positive impacts on women’s lives who are involved in the criminal justice system