Consultant Terms of Reference - Safe Schools Approach at Save the Children

Review Objective/Questions

The objectives of this review are - a) documenting the current situation of the uptake of the Safe School Common Approach in education programmes/projects, b) collating evidence of their effectiveness, and c) scoping opportunities for generating evidence of long-term impact. The specific questions that are expected to be answered from the review include –

• What are the variations in the uptake of the Safe School Common Approach? This will include an analysis of the adoption/adaptation of different components of Safe School that are more/less commonly being incorporated, their scale, and costs. Additional analysis may explore capturing variations across countries and types of awards, and documenting examples of inclusion of additional components or tweaking/innovation of existing components.
• What is the evidence of the impact of the Safe School Common Approach on children’s safety in schools? Building on the evidence available during the creation of this Common Approach, this review will collate new findings/insights that have been gained from the four years of implementation. For impact evidence, the review should also assess their quality in terms of attributing changes in outcomes to the Common Approach. Evaluation reports of the projects that included Safe School interventions would be the primary source of this information.
• Are there changes due to Safe School interventions that may sustain beyond the project period? Besides documenting specific pieces of evidence for sustainability (if available), this may include the “informed opinion” of the reviewer(s) to identify which projects/components/outcomes are likely to have a long-term impact. More specifically, the review is expected to identify opportunities for generating new evidence of the long-term impact.

Method

The review is expected to use different types of documents (e.g. project proposals, technical/grant reports, evaluation reports) as the primary data source. A database can be created where the unit of observation is individual cases of adaptation/replication of the Safe School Common Approach. The Common Approach Dashboard can be used as the starting point to create this database. After consulting the relevant documents for a few cases, the review should determine the important dimensions/variables for which information should be compiled. Although the study may take an iterative approach in collating information, interviews of a few key informants at an early stage can be crucial in constructing the list of variables for completeness and feasibility. A few suggested dimensions for this data collation are listed here - background information (e.g., country, grant size, duration), type of adaptation (e.g., specific components of the common approach incorporated in the project), nature of the project (e.g., humanitarian vs. development, stand-alone intervention of Safe School vs. as a component of other core activities, direct implementation/partnership, primary/secondary school), output/outcomes achieved. Information on all the dimensions should be systematically compiled for each case (wherever available). This data can be used for both quantitative (e.g., summary statistics of adoption of different components, correlates of full/partial uptake) and qualitative (e.g., identifying common challenges, examples of innovations) analyses.

For cases of Safe School uptake that have evaluation reports, the review should discuss the findings along with the types of evaluations. Variations in the impact findings should be analyzed across relevant characteristics in the implementation of the Safe School. If the data permits, the review may incorporate meta-analyses of selected outcomes. The scoping for post-intervention/long-term impact should consider information on the quality of implementation (from monitoring data/interviews), evidence of short-term impact, and feasibility of a “comparison group” to establish causality.

Information gathered from these documents can be supplemented by primary data collected from key informants from country offices. This may include the heads of education programmes in a few country offices purposefully selected by the level of uptake of this Common Approach.

Expected Deliverables

• Inception report outlining methodology, workplan and report structure
• Summary data of the cases of Safe School Common Approach uptake
• A review report following the outline agreed in the inception report

Team and Selection Criteria

The review can be conducted by an individual consultant or by a team of consultants with a lead researcher. To be considered, the study team member(s) must have demonstrated skills, expertise and experience in:

• Designing and conducting systematic reviews
• Conducting studies in the field of education, particularly in relation to child safeguarding
• Sound understanding of the different methods of impact evaluation
• Conducting ethical and inclusive studies involving marginalised, deprived and/or vulnerable groups in culturally appropriate and sensitive ways
• Managing and coordinating a range of government, non-government, community groups and academic stakeholders

There is a high expectation that:

• Members (or a proportion) of the study team have a track record of previously working together.
• A team leader will be appointed who has the seniority and experience in leading complex study projects, and who has the ability and standing to lead a team toward a common goal.
• The team has the ability to commit to the terms of the project and have adequate and available skilled resources to dedicate to this study over the period.
• The team has a strong track record of working flexibly to accommodate changes as the project is implemented.