For its school link programme,VVOB formulated progress markers to monitor progress in the capacity development of the schools to operationalise and sustain their partnerships with schools from other countries. VVOB customised the progress markers tool by formulating more general categories of progress markers for a specific domain of change. VVOB also didn’t use the ‘expect to see’, ‘like to see’ and ‘love to see’ concept when it formulated progress markers. An example of VVOB’s progress markers for the ‘ownership’ domain of change is shown in the textbox below.

Furthermore, for each progress marker category under a specific domain of change, VVOB developed a rubric that consists of four statements that describe criteria for assessing different levels of performance within a progress marker category. This helps to make the process of synthesising evidence into an overall evaluative judgement more transparent. An example of a progress marker category and its accompanying rubric is shown in the table below.

Illustration of one progress marker category with associated rubric in VVOB’s school link programme

The progress markers are used by VVOB staff as an analytic framework that guides their reflection on the monitoring information. This monitoring information is collected through personal observations during school visits, informal feedback and testimonies from teachers and activity reports from the schools. Each monitoring cycle results in qualitative monitoring information in the form of comments and recommendations as well as quantitative scores for each progress marker category for each school involved in the programme. The scores allow the programme to visualise the baseline situation and eventual trends for each of the progress marker categories at school level but also at a more aggregated level across the various schools. Such aggregation is illustrated in the figure below which shows the number of schools according to their average scores for three progress marker categories (i.e. ownership, communication and sustainability).

Number of schools according to their average scores for three dimensions of their school link resulting from monitoring cycles in 2011 and 2012

After having used the progress markers for one year, VVOB staff highlighted a number of advantages and challenges that are shown in Table 6.3. It was observed that the progress markers had helped the VVOB team to develop deeper insights into the programme’s theory of change and to strengthen or adjust their support for the schools. The progress markers were therefore perceived by the VVOB staff to be useful for strengthening the school links. Furthermore it was reported that the progress markers had helped VVOB to report to the donor about the programme’s progress to its specific objective. The challenges were mainly situated around the effort needed for regular follow-up of the progress markers, the process of making evaluative statements about them and concerns about the robustness of the approach for impact evaluation.