Short Abstract

Together an Active Future (a collective of organisations across Lancashire) has learned what it takes (and what doesn't work) to embed evaluation across a complex system, shifting to everyday learning.

Description

This presentation shares learning from Together an Active Future (TaAF), Sport England’s place-based programme in Pennine Lancashire, which has spent the past five years embedding a culture of evaluation and learning across six local authority areas. The work sought to move evaluation from external audit to collective sense-making — positioning insight, reflection, and storytelling as everyday practices rather than compliance tasks.

Situated within Sport England’s wider place-based approaches now scaling across England, TaAF illustrates both the potential and the difficulty of embedding evaluative thinking across diverse systems. While partners increasingly value reflection, it remains one of the biggest challenges for practitioners: knowing what to measure, how to interpret complexity, and how to turn insight into action.

Using realist and developmental evaluation methods, this study explores the conditions that help evaluation “land” within systems. Data is gathered from reflective journals, Stories of Change, Ripple Effect Maps, Conditions Trackers, and more than 60 partner interviews. Analysis focuses on how learning travels — who reads, who acts, and what enables evidence to be used in real time.

Findings show that evaluative practice gains traction when people show up in person to listen, learn, and share their work openly; when reflective spaces are regular and trusted; and when responsibility for learning is written into job roles and governance structures. Evaluation becomes visible and valued when it connects directly to decisions, storytelling, and community voice.

The work contributes to understanding how systems develop the capacity to evaluate themselves, revealing that embedding evaluation is not a technical process but a cultural and relational one. It offers practical insight into how real-time, participatory evaluation can strengthen local learning ecosystems and influence policy and investment decisions across place-based systems.