Terms of Reference

Review of Save the Children Norway’s support to prevent and respond to violence in and around schools

  1. Background

Save the Children (SC) is the world’s leading independent organization for children. Our vision is a world in which every child attains the right to survival, protection, development and participation. Our mission is to inspire breakthroughs in the way the world treats children, and to achieve immediate and lasting change in their lives. Accountability, ambition, collaboration, creativity and integrity are our shared values. SC’s theory of change describes how we work to create immediate and lasting results for children: we will be the voice, we will achieve results at scale, we will be the innovator and we will build partnerships.

Save the Children Norway’s (SCN) priorities are set out in the 2014-2018 Strategy, stating that the organization will focus on Education, Child Rights Governance, Health and Nutrition, Humanitarian Relief and Child Protection.[1]SCN is addressing violence in and around schools through standalone protection projects as well as through parts of the Quality Learning Environment in our education work.

The background for our work in this area is the widespread violence in and around schools and its’ negative effects on children’s protection, development and learning. Across the world children and youth become caught in a cycle of violence as victims and/or perpetrators, with the school often acting as a space for reproduction of violence and a place where children experience violence and learn violent or aggressive behaviour. In some cases, children are prevented from attending school as the environment is perceived as too dangerous or the route to school is unsafe. The violence may be perpetrated by teachers and other school staff or by fellow students, and therefore the work to prevent and respond to violence in the schools involves actors such asschool management, teachers, children, parents, and government authorities.

Recently a global process has been initiated to develop a Save the Children Common Approach (CA) for Violence Free Schools (VFS). A CA is an evidence-based thematic intervention or a combination of interventions based on SC’s best understanding on how to best address a specific problem faced by children. It provides tools and guidance to assist SC’s Country Offices in developing high quality interventions and to ease monitoring, replication and scaling up. CAs must demonstrate strong results and rigorous measurement methodologies. They also should be flexible and relevant for both development context and humanitarian/emergency context. SCN is actively involved in the development of this Common Approach and is planning to step up our work in addressing violence in and around schools.

Against this backdrop, SCN sees the need to get a better overview of the totality of our interventions in this area and increase our knowledge of the effects of and lessons learned from our work. We are therefore commissioning a review of our efforts to prevent and respond to violence in and around schools.

  1. Purpose and use of the review

The main purpose of the review is internal learning for Save the Children. First and foremost, the insight gained from the review will be used to inform the development of SCN’s new Strategy 2019-22 and our new Norad Framework agreement from 2019. Moreover, it will be used to adjust our current programmatic approach as necessary. Secondly, the review will be feeding into the ongoing Save the Children global work to develop a Common Approach to Violence Free Schools.

The main audience for the review report is Save the Children Norway staff and Save the Children staff globally, including members of the Child Protection and Education Global Themes and SC staff involved in the development of a Violence Free Schools Common Approach (VFS CA). Secondly, the review will be of interest toother stakeholders such as Norad, MFA, Operation a Day’s Work(ODW)[2]and others.

The consultancy is meant to complement other SC studies related to this thematic area, particularly the on-going consultancy related to the global VFS CA.The consultants are expected to be in contact with the consultants working on the global CA VFS consultancy in order to ensure that the two processes are complementary and not overlapping.

  1. Objectives

The main objectives of the review are to:

a)Get an overview of what SCN is doing:Conduct a mapping of all interventions intended to prevent and respond to violence in and around schools within our protection and education portfolios.The mapping should include a description of the interventions and how they have been implemented.

b)Find out what works and why:Assess and document achievements/resultsand identify good practices of interventions to prevent and respond to violence in and around schools across our protection and education portfolios (including in depth studies in three countries for deeper understanding and analysis). Considerations of sustainability and local ownership should be included in the assessment.

c)Look forward: Highlight lessons learned, identify success criteria and provide recommendations on how to improve SCN’s future programming in this area.

The starting point for this review is child protection, and achievements ofresults will be guided by Save the Children’s Child Protection Breakthrough: “Violence against children is no longer tolerated”. Results achievements will therefore be assessed according to children’s well-being and protection, not by the extent to which they lead to increased learning outcomes.

  1. Key Review questions

The key questions specified under each objective are preliminary and should guide the review team in further developing the review design and questions.

Objective a)

Conduct a mapping of interventions intended to prevent and respond to violence in and around schools within our protection and education portfolios

Key questions to be addressed:

  • What are the main interventions/strategies/components implemented?
  • How have they been implemented?
  • Who are the partners?
  • How were the interventions designed (by SC staff, by partners or other stakeholders or in collaboration)?
  • How much funding are spent on this and in what locations?
  • What are the main types of violence that the interventions are aimed at preventing/responding to?
  • Are the majority of the interventions aimed at prevention or response?
  • How much of this work is classified under child protection vs. education?
  • Are protection and education work overlapping or are the two thematic areas promoting/implementing different strategies/approaches to addressing violence in and around schools?
  • How has child protection and education staff worked together/benefitted from each other’s expertise in these interventions?
  • What are the main challenges related to the cross thematic nature of this work?
  • To what extent are the interventions addressing gender and transforming discriminatory gender norms and power dynamics which underpin violence against children in and around schools?
  • Are we ensuring that we reach the most deprived children with these interventions?
  • How systematically have we worked to ensure children’s meaningful participation throughout this work?

Objective b)

a)Assess and document achievements/results and identify good practices of interventions to prevent and respond to violence in and around schools across our protection and education portfolios (including in depth studies in three countries for deeper understanding and analysis)

The assessment should be centred around the OECD/DAC evaluation criteria.

Key questions to be addressed:

Relevance:

  • Are the interventions relevant to the priorities of the target groups (children, teachers, school administration, communities, parents etc)?
  • Are the interventions relevant to the priorities and policies of SCN, SCI, Norad and other donors?
  • Are the interventions relevant to the priorities and policies of the countries in question?
  • Are the objectives of the interventions still relevant and valid?
  • Are the activities and outputs of the interventions consistent with the overall goal and the attainment of its objectives?
  • Are the activities and outputs of the interventions consistent with the intended impacts and effects?

Effectiveness:

  • To what extent have the interventions achieved/are likely to achieve their objectives?
  • What are the most significant results of these interventions?
  • Have the interventions contributed to larger scale changes (e.g. systems, policies etc. beyond the project itself)?
  • What components have been more successful?
  • How is the choice of partners affecting the results?
  • Dointerventions implemented as part of a larger education intervention have other objectives than interventions implemented as standalone protection projects?Are the results and quality of the two different?
  • How are the results of standalone protection interventions in schools where we do not implement QLE vs. interventions being part of a larger education intervention (QLE)?
  • Does it make a difference if it is an education program with CP components or visa-versa?
  • Are interventions implemented as part of a larger education intervention focusing sufficiently on the protection aspects and has protection expertise been involved?
  • Are all the education programmes always working on all the substandards under the relevant QLE Guiding Principles (If not, which ones are not considered that important, ref. new QLF with fewer items and shift in focus)?
  • To what degree does the work to prevent and respond to violence in and around schools link up with protection systems and referral mechanisms outside of the school, and how successful is this work? Challenges?
  • What specific achievements related to gender can be identified?
  • Do interventions target the most vulnerable and deprived children?
  • How significant is children’s meaningful participation for achieving results?
  • To what extent are the interventions based on rights based programming?
  • What are the potential pit falls, what did not work?

Efficiency:

  • Were interventions cost-efficient?
  • Were objectives achieved on time?
  • Were the interventions implemented in the most efficient way compared to alternatives? Compare and assess standalone protection interventions with activities integrated in education (QLE)

Sustainability:

  • Are the results sustainable? How has sustainability been secured?
  • To what extent are the benefits of the interventions likely to continue after donor funding ceases?
  • How are partnerships affecting the sustainability?
  • Scalability: are the interventions replicable for the governments or other actors?
  • What were the major factors influencing the achievement or non-achievement of sustainability of the interventions?

Objective c)

b)Highlight lessons learned, identify success criteria and provide recommendations on how to improve SCN’s future programming in this area.

Key questions to be addressed:

  • What are the most successful strategies/interventions? What can we learn from these?
  • What are the success factors for achieving results?
  • Are there particular combinations of interventions/activities that are more successful?
  • Where are the gaps that we are currently not filling adequately?
  • How can we enhance thematic integration between Child Protection and Education?
  • What are the best practices or lessons learned in the work to address the needs and barriers for girls and boys respectively?
  • How can we improve our programming in order to reach the most deprived and to address gender barriers in a more systematic way?
  • What interventions should SCN invest in for the future?
  1. Scope of the evaluation

Thematic scope:

The main scope of the evaluation will be all SCN supported long-term Norad funded development interventions seeking to prevent and respond to violence in and around schools. Some interventions outside our Norad portfolio which are specifically addressing violence in schools will be included in the assessment. One examples is the ODW Violence Free Schools project in LAC.

Addressing violence in schools is cross thematic and therefore some of the interventions to be assessed are classified asbelonging to thethematic area of protection whereas many belongs to our education portfolio.

Geographical scope:

  • The mapping will cover all SCN support addressing violence in and around schools globally.
  • The final selection of countries for in depth study will be discussed at the inception stage and decided after the mapping exercise is completed. We will seek to include a variation of contexts and types of interventions, and criterias for selection will be discussed with the consultants. We aim to include 3 countries for in depth review, tentatively one of the ODW countries (Guatemala)and two other countries in Africa or Asia.

The review will not include humanitarian work or MFA funded programmes. The timeframe of the interventions for the review will coincide with the start of the current SCN Norad agreement: 2015 to date.

  1. Evaluation design and methodology:

The consultants should present a detailed statement of proposed methods in the technical proposal. When developing the methodology the consultants should consider a children’s rights approach as well as children’s participation. The guiding principles mentioned in the Save the Children International Evaluation Handbook[3] Should be taken into account.

The review should be a participatory process, where the team of consultants will act as facilitators and drivers of the process. As the review will be a learning process the active involvement of SC staff at various levels are recommended.

The review should include, but not necessarily limit to the following methods:

  • Desk review of relevant documents (country annual plans, annual reports, field reports, relevant national policy documents etc.)
  • Survey as part of the mapping exercise
  • Key informant interviews with SCN and SCI employees, country level staff, implementing partners etc.
  • Focus groups discussions with relevant people.

We foresee a mixed methodology using both quantitative and qualitative methods, with an emphasis on the qualitative aspects.

  1. Organisation, roles and responsibilities

The entire review process will be led by external consultants. SCN will select the potential candidates based on the technical and financial proposals submitted. The consultant will also be responsible for developing a sound research methodology, planning and conducting a consultative/participatory review and managing the data collection, as well as writing the reports and presenting the findings and recommendations.

As the main purpose is learning we find it important to ensure ownership of the review within SCN. Therefore, one or more SCN technical expert(s) will be closely involved in the review process and possibly take part in one or more of the field visits. We also anticipate this to be a participatory process giving room for SC staff in the selected case countries to actively participate and contribute to this learning process facilitated by external consultants.

SCN will be responsible for facilitating the review process through making available relevant documents and give feedback to the consultant. A small project group will be established to manage the consultancy. The group, consisting of SCN staff from the Global results section, the Child Rights Section and the Communication and Advocacy Section, will review and validate the inception report, the draft and the final report, and will also be engaged in discussing how the findings will be followed up. SCN will be responsible of covering the entire costs for the assignment.

8. Desired competencies and skills of the consultants

  • Advanced university degree in social sciences or equivalent with excellent understanding of Education and Child Protection and violence in the school context.
  • A good understanding of gender equality programming is necessary
  • Experience with designing and implementing development programmes
  • Extensive and proven international experience in designing and conducting independent evaluations, desk studies and/or research of development programmes and advocacy
  • Good communication, analytical and drafting skills;
  • Identify with Save the Children’s values and principles;
  • Familiarity with a rights-based approach
  • Language requirements: English and Spanish. French desirable.

9- Deliverables
After the selection of consultant team, the consultants are expected to submit the inception report. Within the agreed timeline, the consultants are also expected to submit the draft review report for comment and feedback from the respective technical people at SCN. If possible and convenient, the consultant will present the preliminary findings to SCN technical staff. Eventually, the consultant is responsible to incorporate feedback provided and submit the final report. SCN will share the report template to be used for report writing.

The following deliverables are to be produced:

  • Inception report with detailed work plan for the evaluation to be approved by SCN project group
  • Draft and final evaluation report of maximum 40 pages (incl. executive summary)
  • Case study reports as annexes.
  • In country debriefs
  • Presentation of preliminary findings and presentations at workshops or conferences.

Suggestions for complimentary alternative/additional visual reporting methods are welcome, and ideas will be discussed with SCN.

10. Timeline
The consultancy is estimated to a maximum of 50 working days.

Tentative dates for the consultancy work are:

Task / Proposed date / Responsibility
Receive proposals from consultants / October 13 / SCN
Finalize the recruitment process of the consultant / October 27 / SCN
Finalize contractual arrangements and service agreements / November 3 / SCN & consultant
Initial briefings and provision of key documentation / November 10 / SCN & consultant
Submission of inception report / November 20 / Consultant
Submission of draft report / January 26 / Consultant
Submission of final report and debrief / February 15 / Consultant

11. Contract and payments

Save the Children Norway will sign a consultancy contract with the consultant. 30%of the total amount will be paid upon signing the contract, 30% will be paid upon submission of draft report and the remaining 40% upon submission and approval of the final report and all deliverables.

12. Contact information

For further information, please contact any of the following:

  • Veslemøy Ask, Senior Advisor Evaluation and Knowledge Management,
  • Hanne Lotte Moen, Senior Advisor Child Protection,

[1]SCN (2013).Investing in Children. Save the Children Norway Strategy 2014-2017. Retrieved from:

[2]ODW is a Norwegian youth campaign/donor.

[3]O’Neill, K. (2012). Evaluation Handbook.Retrieved from: