For decades, evaluation of programmes or services has largely followed a familiar process. Organisations deliver a service or programme, and commission an organisation such as the Applied Research Collaboration- Northwest Coast (ARC-NWC) to conduct an evaluation to report its impact. Several months after the completion of the programme, a report is produced outlining what was effective, what was not, and recommendations for future delivery. While this approach has undoubtedly generated valuable evidence, it is being challenged by the realities of service delivery in today’s society.
Public sector services and third sector organisations operate in communities that are constantly changing with policy priorities shifting, funding landscapes fluctuating, and service users’ whose needs rarely remain the same. In my experience, waiting until the end of a programme to gain insight into impact is no longer sufficient for commissioners of evaluations. By the time findings are published, opportunities to improve service delivery are already lost. This growing recognition has led to an important shift in evaluation practice: from evaluation as a retrospective or one-off exercise towards evaluation as an ongoing process of learning. At the heart of this evolution is the emergence of learning partnerships.
A learning partnership moves beyond the traditional client–evaluator relationship. Rather than acting solely as an independent evaluator, researchers work alongside commissioners, practitioners and stakeholders throughout programme delivery to support continuous learning, reflection and adaptation. The emphasis is not simply on producing evidence, but on helping organisations make sense of that evidence while programmes and services are still being delivered.
Learning partnerships are rooted in the idea that knowledge related to service improvement is best co-produced as practitioners can apply key context to evaluation findings. Evaluators contribute methodological expertise, practitioners contribute contextual understanding, and together they can generate insights that neither could achieve separately. Regular reflective meetings, collaborative workshops, learning logs, and iterative feedback loops replace the traditional model of waiting until the final report to discuss how a service or programme can be improved. Importantly, this does not mean sacrificing methodological rigour or evaluator independence but rather it recognises that evaluation can be both rigorous and useful in real-time. Robust evidence becomes something that informs decisions as they happen rather than simply documenting decisions that have already been made.
The shift toward learning partnerships has been driven largely by the changing needs of organisations across the public and voluntary sectors. Increasingly, commissioners are not only asking whether programmes achieve their intended outcomes, but how services can continually improve whilst they are being delivered. In complex systems, programmes and services are rarely implemented or received by service users exactly as originally planned. Consequently, adaptation it is often essential for success and much of the public sector already understands its value to the continuation of programmes and services. Learning partnerships acknowledge this need and instead of assuming that programmes should follow a fixed pathway from implementation to conclusion, they recognise that services evolve through cycles of testing, learning and refinement. Evaluation can therefore become an active component of programme delivery rather than a separate, detached activity.
In my experience, perhaps one of the most significant contributions of learning partnerships is the creation of a positive narrative around learning. Traditional evaluations have sometimes been perceived as judgement exercises or audits, encouraging organisations to focus primarily on demonstrating success. Learning partnerships encourage something different as they create space for honest conversations about uncertainty, unintended consequences and implementation challenges. At their best, learning partnerships help organisations to feel more confident in focussing on insights that will provide a better understanding of the work. In other words, they move beyond simply asking “What happened?” to asking ‘So what?’, ‘Why?’, and ‘How?’. It focuses on what it may mean for the organisation, the service users, and the initiative. Crucially, this includes having the confidence to share what has not worked so well, recognising that understanding challenges often generates the most valuable learning and opportunity for service improvement. This emphasis on testing and learning fundamentally changes the relationship between evidence and decision-making. Instead of producing static reports that risk sitting on shelves, learning becomes embedded in real-time and within everyday practice. Emerging findings are shared quickly, discussed collaboratively and translated into improvements that can benefit current service users rather than just future programmes.
For an evaluator like myself, I have recognised that this evolution also requires a different set of skills. Alongside methodological expertise in evaluation design and analysis, learning partners must be skilled facilitators, conveners and critical friends. They must be comfortable navigating complexity, building trusting relationships across organisations, and helping practitioners not familiar with research or evaluation collectively interpret the evidence. Much of this work involves asking thoughtful questions, creating opportunities for reflection and supporting organisations to make sense of emerging information.
For researchers working within research intensive organisations such as the ARC NWC, learning partnerships present an exciting opportunity to adopt more innovative approaches to evaluation that are grounded in co-creation, collaboration, reflection and real-time learning. By embedding researchers alongside practitioners and communities, evaluators can help generate actionable evidence that not only demonstrates impact, but actively supports service improvement, innovation and system transformation as the change unfolds.
Perhaps the greatest measure of success for any evaluation is no longer whether it produces a detailed report, but whether it helps organisations learn, adapt and improve while there is still time to make a difference for service users.
Written by Dr Oliver Hamer, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit at Edge Hill University.