How Good is our Third Sector Organisation Pilot
Case Study: LGBT Youth Scotland
LGBT Youth Scotland is the largest youth and community-based organisation for lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in Scotland. The charity seeks to empower
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people and the wider LGBT community so
that they are embraced as full members of the Scottish family at home, school and in every
community. We operate services across Scotland which are designed to remove barriers
which prevent young people from being confident individuals, successful learners, effective
contributors and responsible citizens.
At LGBT Youth Scotland, we have fostered a culture of self-evaluation which develops year
on year, and we have used ‘How Good is our Community Learning and Development 2’ as the
basis for our annual reporting on self-evaluation. We felt that becoming involved in the
pilot for ‘How Good is our Third Sector Organisation’ would allow us an opportunity to step
back and focus on the impact of some key areas of our work whilst having the opportunity
to influence and shape the development of the new tool to make it suitable for the third
sector.
We had staff meetings to consider our focus areas, and support meetings with colleagues
from Education Scotland. We had to decide on the areas of our work which we would look
at and chose:-
1. Checkmates- our one to one work with young people designed to support their
learning journey through LGBT Youth Scotland.
2. LGBT Charter of Rights- a capacity building tool to support organisations on their
journey towards LGBT inclusion.
As well as lots of learning and feedback about the HGIOTSO tool itself, some of our key
learning is as follows:
1. Checkmates
We chose to focus on 2 of the key outcomes for the purposes of the evaluation. 1.2 Adherence
to Statutory Principles, as we’d never looked at this work through this lens before, and 2.1
Impact on Participants to ask ourselves whether it was achieving what it set out to do. A
summary of our learning includes:
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We need to improve communication between managers and frontline staff on some
of the policy drivers and developments for our work.
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We need to prioritise training and learning in relation to the new Children and Young
People Act in the year ahead.
Our monitoring processes are already very strong in relation to their connection to
Curriculum for Excellence and learning journeys.
Staff would benefit from training in wider policy and processes beyond the Education
field or sector.
We found good evidence through local case studies of where Checkmates work was
effective in terms of improved outcomes for young people but we recognised a lack
of capacity which impacted the coverage of the system.
We also found little evidence which could help us to evaluate whether partnership
working necessarily enhanced outcomes for young people.
We found that the average length of time a young person is involved in LGBT Youth
Scotland services has decreased over the past few years but we need to do some
further work to clarify onward destinations of young people.
We found that we were more likely to be seen as a targeted or specialist youth work
provider in larger areas, but that in our smaller areas, we were seen equally as a good
universal provider of youth work as well as providing targeted services.
An unintended outcome was a lack of understanding around the connections to
statutory guidance and by extension, understanding and quality assurance, for some
of our arms lengths groups which has led to some improvements in the current year.
2. Charter
The areas we identified as important for our charter programme were impact on local
community; partnership working; showing leadership to others in regards to LGBT
inclusion. The indicators we identified to align with these areas are 4.1, 8.1 and 9.3, and
our learning included:
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We found strong evidence of impact on organisations, but less systematic ways of
gathering that evidence internally, and have thus have updated our evaluations to
take account.
We recognised that some of the charter aims which are about longer term impact or
community or attitudinal change, are areas which are harder to measure and thought
the HGIOTSO tool might benefit from some consideration of this, as well as
improvements in our own measurement of this area.
We learned that the importance of relationships was key to the success of a good
experience in the charter and recognised a greater need for us to pay attention to this
internally.
We found inconsistencies in the extent to which charter clients felt informed of the
end process and requirements and we have reconsidered our end-stage processes
internally to ensure that staff are clearer of expectations.
Despite training and support, not all staff are confident in delivery of the charter and
we are refocusing on the development of tools to support staff to improve confidence.
Work which is about removing barriers and changing attitudes are difficult to
measure and particularly for organisations who are intermediary bodies and
therefore facilitate this happening for other organisations or play one part in a larger
initiative, then there are questions of impact and attribution.