#ThisIsDerby evaluation report

The University of Derby were asked by Derby County Community Trust to undertake a small evaluation of a large-scale intervention to expand sports and arts participation among young people in Derby – to ‘broaden their horizons’. The intervention itself ran from September 2018 and the evaluation was commissioned in February 2019. The evaluation took a mixed method and broadly ‘realist’ approach, first locating the programme in the wider literature related to social mobility, education and ‘essential life skills’, and then assessing a range of qualitative and quantitative data about the programme and its impacts on young people. The report is structured reviews the wider literature on social mobility, education and essential life skills and assesses evidence from multiple sources about the effectiveness of the #ThisIsDerby programme in developing Essential Life Skills among young people who participated.