National Evaluation of the Troubled Families Programme – Final Synthesis Report

In January 2013, Ecorys was commissioned by Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) to lead a consortium providing an independent evaluation of the Phase One Troubled Families Programme1 . The evaluation included process, impact and economic strands of work, culminating in a set of final reports in September 2015. This report presents the overall summative findings from the evaluation. It is based on triangulated evidence from across all strands of the evaluation informing the final report series, which include:  quasi-experimental research using outcomes data from national administrative datasets, and a large-scale face-to-face survey of families, comparing families going through the programme with a matched comparison group  qualitative case study research with a purposive sample of 20 local authorities, conducted longitudinally, and  snapshot qualitative telephone interviews with a further 50 local authorities. The report also draws selectively on monitoring data collected on a self-report basis from 143 local authorities at three points in time during the evaluation, and a quantitative survey of local authorities conducted during the early stages of the programme to map the broad characteristics of local Troubled Families programmes. The synthesis report is complemented with a series of technical reports, detailing the findings from the impact analysis of the administrative data (Bewley, et al., 2016); survey data (Purdon and Bryson, 2016); process evaluation (White and Day, 2016), and qualitative research with families (Blades, et al., 2016). The series also includes shorter technical reports on the Family Monitoring Data (Whitley, 2016), and the survey of families (Panayiotou, et al., 2016).