A Co-constructed and Co-produced Evaluation of the Anchor Project in Shetland

Report Overview

This report consists of seven sections. Section One outlines the key evaluation aims and questions and a description of the methods and approaches we used to address those. Section Two describes our understanding of the policy and local socio-economic and geographic contexts within which the Anchor project operates. Section Three sets out what we found out about Anchor’s main elements i.e. what services and supports it consists of, who is involved in its delivery, how it operates and what values underpin its operation. This section also details what we understand about how Anchor came into being and what we came to understand about the critical success factors that enable Anchor to operate as it does. Section Four presents the views and perspectives of some of the parents who have benefited from Anchor, who told us about their Anchor experiences, and how they benefitted from it, during our field visits. This section also details Anchor project workers, team and Board members perspectives about who they thought were missing out from benefiting from Anchor, and, what they thought would be lost if Anchor did not operate in the future. Section Five presents our conclusions about and graphic representation of the Anchor Programme Theory of Change, as well as the Theory of Change at the Individual Level as described by the parents we spoke to who had engaged with Anchor. Section Six discusses our study’s strengths and limitations including some of the data gaps in this report that merit further investigation. The final Section Seven outlines a set of enabling factors and considerations that are intended to guide the introduction, implementation and sustainability actions and scalability of this intervention in other island, remote, rural or other contexts in Scotland.