Blog post by Marie Hendry, CEO of College Development Network (CDN)
In her blog, The Value of One Thread in a Whole Tapestry, Claire Mills, Evaluation and Impact Manager at the Scottish Funding Council (SFC), discusses the recent SFC retrospective review of the funding body’s investment in the College Development Network (CDN) and its resultant Evaluation Report.
Insights and Evaluation: Establishing Key Threads
A key theme that emerged for the new SFC Centre for Excellence in Evaluation team in their first review of this kind was the importance of insight and evaluation to establish the key threads of activity for an organisation like CDN in a ‘tapestry’ that contains many threads – in this case, sector agencies, partners, colleges, and the wider tertiary sector.
What’s critically important to us here at CDN is to know that we are playing a critical role in weaving the golden thread through that tapestry. The review, with its mixed-methods approach, including scoping activities, performance data analysis, surveys, and interviews, highlighted the breadth and depth of CDN’s contribution to the sector we serve.
Welcoming the Shift to Outcomes and Impact
The shift in SFC’s approach to monitoring and evaluation, from focusing on activities delivered to outcomes and impact, is a welcome development and one which aligns with CDN’s own commitment to demonstrating the value and impact of our work. Over the past two years, CDN has restructured and realigned our focus to prioritise delivery to support colleges through quality improvement, best practice, and skills development. Ensuring that in uncertain times and through financial challenges, we allocate our resources to those areas required by colleges and our funders and ensure we listen, deliver, and evaluate our offer. It’s encouraging to see the report highlight that this direction of travel is welcomed by those we work with.
The Importance of Partnership Working
One of the key themes that emerged from the review was the importance of partnership working. At CDN, we believe that collaboration is at the heart of achieving meaningful impact, and the report’s findings that CDN plays a critical enabling role in bringing agencies together with colleges is one that we are particularly pleased about. The review underscored the challenges of disentangling the roles of different agencies and the need for clear communication and defined roles. That’s something that we know is important to our college partners, and we’re committed to continuing to work with SFC and our partners to improve that clarity. One recent example is the collaborative work of the sector quality agencies working on the Tertiary Quality Enhancement Framework (TQEF), where all organisations involved have shared their 2025/26 deliverables with each other and established lead organisations for each activity.
Enhancing Monitoring and Evaluation Processes
As we move forward, CDN is dedicated to enhancing our monitoring and evaluation processes in partnership with SFC. The aim? To ensure that we can work together to develop robust, informative, and proportionate evaluation methods that measure not only the increasing numbers of people engaging with CDN or the improving satisfaction levels of our course feedback but that tell the real story of the impact of our work, the improvements we support colleges in making, and the difference our networks, best practice advice, governance expertise, and leadership development make to those working in Scotland’s colleges and wider tertiary sector – and ultimately in support of our students.
Measuring Impact
How do you best measure that impact? We’re doing so through our Delivery Agreements with Scotland’s colleges, through dedicated focus groups with those who have used our services, and we’re redeveloping our bi-annual workforce survey to get to the heart of what our college workforce needs to develop themselves and their colleges. Those all point toward the golden thread, but there’s still more to do to unravel the strands and show the real impact of our work now and in the future. We’re delighted that as part of the review’s recommendations, we’re working with SFC on a pilot this year to do just that. Watch this space!
