This summer I completed my Impact and Evaluation LIA at Unlocking Potential. Unlocking Potential is a charity focusing on the well-being of children and young adults facing Social, Emotional, and Mental Health difficulties. My responsibility was to help with the programme evaluation, outcome measurement, and data analysis, as well as produce the annual and impact evaluation report for the charity.

Stakeholder for Impact Evaluation

The School Programme at Unlocking Potential provides a high-quality mental health and wellbeing service to primary and secondary schools across London, delivering a range of interventions designed to meet the needs of children. The main intervention types include 1:1 child psychotherapy, six-time talk time, a speak-up service, occupational therapy, and speech and language therapy. The impact report will help therapists assess the effectiveness of each type of intervention and make improvements in the future, help the school to identify the change of circumstances for their students with SEMH (Social, emotional and mental health) needs, help the charity with fundraising in the next year and inform the donor about the positive impact their donation brings.

Personal experience

After the training for the company police, code for data protection and use of tools like Salesforce for the first few days, I started to help with the impact and annual report by helping identify missing data and collecting it from the therapist. The method used this year for impact evaluation is through survey rating at the end of each session by students, teachers and parents. Throughout the process, I found that the team used to manually find out the missing data in the goal of the intervention, which became less effective as the size of the data expanded, I made some improvements by utilising the pivot table function in Excel. So in the future, it will be much easier for the team to keep tracking the goals set in the intervention for each child. After the data collection, I completed the annual report and impact evaluation for 17 schools in The School Programme.

Challenges and lessons learnt from the experience.

The 6-week LIA project brought a lot of personal growth to me, the training at the beginning deepened my awareness of data protection, and throughout the process, I became familiar with tools like Salesforce, and my technical skill for data analysis has become much more fluent, and I have learnt some lesson with the data collection process.

In most of my courses at the college, data were mostly collected and given out for further manipulation, so when I assisted with collecting data with the therapist, I gained some understanding of the difficulties of data collection, especially with younger children.

First, the therapist needs to build trust as a friend with the children for effective intervention results, but asking children to complete a survey to rate the service may disrupt the trust of some children. Secondly, children are more likely to be driven by emotion, they may just give out good feedback due to a good mood or negative feedback because they are having a bad day. Also, some young children may not be able to completely understand the survey question due to ambiguity and lack of understanding, and finally, some of them may just lack of patience to complete the survey, so they might just randomly select from the survey or just refuse to do it.

We came up with some solutions to help with the data collection such as involving the question in conversation for the therapist to ask so the children do not need to complete the survey by themselves. However, there are still improvements in the effective collection of reliable data.

Moreover, through observing and working with my team leaders, I can see how she navigate challenges, inspire teams, and make impactful decisions. This experience helps me understand that leadership isn't just about authority but also about empathy, communication, and adaptability. This practical experience reshapes my understanding of leadership from a theoretical concept to a dynamic skill I can cultivate and embody in my career.