We’re obsessed with trying to get students to feel a sense of belonging at uni. It’s often something that we are trying to make happen, and we measure whether it has with a survey.

What if belonging isn’t an outcome at all? What if belonging is a ‘change mechanism’.

I grew up in Shropshire, where there are rolling hills and places to buy homemade jam. It also has some of the lowest rates of access and participation to higher education in the country.

And it’s going to get worse.

The 2026 local elections happened last Thursday, and throughout the weekend, every pundit under the sun has been crafting their stories… but a lot of these are completely conflicting.

They all have access to the same objective data in the form of votes. But they are coming to different conclusions. So what’s happening?

The HE sector is in trouble.

But, when universities are fighting for survival, can you really trust what their evaluations say?

Organisations and businesses often make a key evaluation mistake: conflating outputs and outcomes.

And for organisations and businesses across multiple sectors, it is incredibly costly.

Creating your own survey question seems easy enough, but I’ve seen some absolute whoppers in my time.

Let me show you a bad example, with 6 mistakes I’ve seen in real life, and what to do to fix it.

A two-year study. Three universities. Randomised controlled trials. And the result?

The intervention didn't work. But that isn’t the end of the story.

If you want to find out what side of the road that a Roman drives on, you can’t survey them. But in 1998, an old Roman quarry was uncovered near Swindon and it gave the answer.

How do you find out about behaviour without speaking to anyone?

Evaluation can be about assessing the value of something. But value isn’t just one thing. Understanding this has implications for what we evaluate, and the ethics behind it.

So, let me explain it simply, by asking “is this car good?”.

It’s obviously common sense that Parkrun is good for your health. Spending money evaluating it is a waste of taxpayers money, right? ….what a load of nonsense.

Your focus is delivering your work, supporting those who need it, responding to what’s in front of you, and doing your best with limited time and resources.

Creating a Theory of Change… why should you care?

Budgets for evaluation are being slashed. I’ve seen this first hand in Higher Education Institutions, and I’m betting it’s happening elsewhere too.

But the need for measuring impact and evaluative work remains. So what is the solution?

Billy Wong’s recent article about how Theory of Change is being used, is excellent.

However, there is one area where I take a slightly different view.

Elfrida is a Swedish tax inspector. Her job is to locate people who were not paying taxes for dog ownership.

What does she do to track the dogs down?

“Good doesn’t necessarily mean complicated. It means done well”

When people hear the word simplifying, they often worry it means ‘making things basic’, ‘cutting corners’, or ‘not doing things properly’.

I’m proposing something different.

Last month I wrote a guest article for TASO about how to write a Theory of Change using their Mapping Outcome and Activities Tools (MOATs).

In it, I described how writing a Theory of Change in some ways is like writing a pop song.

For me, evaluation is part art, part science.