aes24 International Evaluation Conference

Authors: Mallory Notting (First Person Consulting)

The ACT Government implemented a suite of programs over the ten year period between 2012 and 2022 aiming to increase the rates of students actively travelling to and from school. 102 schools in the ACT participated in at least one of the three programs during this time which targeted well-known barriers to active travel, including parental perceptions of safety and infrastructure around school. The programs were intended to contribute towards a range of broader priorities, including health, safety, and environmental outcomes.

This short-paper session will share learnings from evaluating long-term behaviour change at a population level, based on the school active travel evaluation. The evaluation represents a unique case study, as the evaluators needed to look retrospectively over ten years of program delivery and assess whether the combination of programs had created changes within the system and had resulted in the achievement of wider goals.

The presenter will illustrate that the line between short-term and long-term outcomes is rarely linear or clear, as is the relationship between individual interventions and whole of system change. This will be done by summarising the approach taken for the evaluation and sharing the diversity of information collated for analysis, which included individual program data and attitudinal and infrastructure-level data spanning the whole school environment.

Evaluators are often only able to examine the shorter term outcomes of an intervention, even in complex policy areas, and then rely on a theory of change to illustrate the assumed intended wider impacts. The presenter was able to scrutinise these wider impacts during the active travel evaluation, an opportunity not regularly afforded to evaluators. The lessons from the active travel evaluation are therefore pertinent for other evaluations in complex policy areas and may carry implications for program design as the focus shifts increasingly towards population-level, systems change.