The topic of evaluation in the extra scholastic educational field is an open challenge for educational research, in terms of building knowledge, practices and tools. The paper explore the subject focusing the attention about residential child and youth care.

Today residential care services are important resources for the protection and promotion of children and adolescents temporarily or permanently deprived of his or her family environment.

European recommendations highlight that the type of placement must primarily take account of the needs and best interests of the child, bearing in mind the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Particularly, the ‘Recommendation Rec(2005)5 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on the rights of children living in residential institutions’ sets out a list of basic principles, specific rights of children living in residential institutions, such as:

• the right to maintain regular contact with the child’s family and other significant people;
• the right to an identity;
• the right to good quality health care adapted to the needs and well-being of the individual child;
• the right to participate in decision-making processes concerning the child and the living conditions in the institution.

To ensure the implementation of these rights, the Recommendation Rec(2005)5 suggests the following guidelines and quality standards:

• a small family-style living unit;
• an individual care plan, based on both the development of the child's capacities and abilities and respect for his or her autonomy;
• the stability of staff and high professional standards of the staff;
• a multidisciplinary teamwork and other means of support, including supervision and in service-training;
• an efficient system of monitoring, evaluation and external control of residential institutions.

The European standards Quality4Children (2010) are an important contribution, complementary to Rec(2005)5, towards the harmonization of childcare systems in Europe,  based on the experiences and good practices of the people directly concerned. These Standards were launched at the European Parliament in June 2007 and are available in 27 languages.

The international literature about residential child and youth care has developed extensively during the last two decades. The need for outcomes-based studies and evidence-based practices is testified to by more international researches on the subject (Knorth E.J., Harder A.T., Zandberg T., & Kendrick A.J., 2008; James, 2015; Boel-Studt & Tobia, 2016).

In Italy, according to the legislation, all residential institutions for children are to be accredited and registered by the competent public authority. The law no. 149/2001 also stipulates that the organization of residential care should be “a family type” with high emphasis put on interpersonal relations.

The most recent national data estimate 3.352 residential care services and 22.975 children and young people living in residential institutions (Italian Authority for Children and Adolescents, 2017). Despite the relevance of these numbers, in Italy there are different approaches and lack of quality assessment guidelines.

Starting from this theoretical framework, the paper describes the first step emerged of the action-research project ‘Evaluate to improve the quality of residential care’- carried out in Sardinia by University of Sassari in collaboration with the Department of Juvenile and Community Justice – in order to set up a self-evaluation tool of residential care. Main research questions are:

• What quality criteria implicitly guide educational and professional practices in residential care services?
• How they can contribute to the participatory construction of self-assessment processes?

Main objectives of the the research are the following: - to build, in a participatory way, a self-assessment tool of the quality and effectiveness of educational interventions and care process in residential care services; - to encourage reflection, awareness and active involvement of residential care staff and child/adolescents and care leavers in a self-evaluation process; - to activate improvement paths in residential care services; - to validate and to test the reliability and effectiveness of self-evaluation tool. In the first phase of the research (June-December 2016) the action research strategy (R-A) was implemented. In fact, Action Research promotes a professional partnership between researchers and practitioners, focused on solving a problem or to improve educational contexts and institutions (Leeman, Y., Van Koeven E., & Schaafsma F., 2018; Zanniello G., 2016; Mortari L., 2007). The research involved 49 participants (educational staff of 15 regional residential care services, social workers and educators from the Centre of Juvenile Justice of Sardinia). Data were collected with a plurality of research instruments, such as: focus group; working group; brainstorming; interviews, audio recording of conversational situations and content analysis. The ongoing development and systematization of outcomes were constantly returned to the participants, with the dual purpose of receiving useful feed-backs and, at the same time, of reconstructing the sense of the research path. The C.I.P.P. Evaluation Model (Stufflebeam, 1989) is the conceptual framework for guiding the implementation of tool and guidelines for self-evaluation in residential care. Corresponding to the letters in the acronym C.I.P.P., this model's core concepts are context, input, process, and product evaluation. The purpose of the multidimensional model is not to prove but to improve. Other participatory evaluation models examined were: the Utilization Focused Evaluation (Patton, 2008); the Practical Participatory Evaluation (Cousins & Earl, 1992); the Transformative Participatory Evaluation (Estrella & Gaventa, 1998) and the Participatory Action-Research (Argyris & SchÖn, 1991). In the second phase of the research (January – September 2017) the first tool’s validation was carried out by a 20 residential care services in Sardinia (15 who participated in the R-A path and others 5 who will become part of the sample in the validation phase). The analysis of the self-evaluation reports produced by practitioners is currently underway.

The first outcome of the research is the preliminary version of the tool and guidelines for self-evaluation in residential youth and child care. Guidelines aim to support the stakeholders to identify strengths and weaknesses and good practices in care-taking process. Guidelines for self-evaluation are called C.A.M., that is the acronym, in Italian language, of Contesto (Context), Accompagnamento (Accompaniment) and Miglioramento (Improvement), which are the three main sections of the tool. The context is the background and the setting in which the educational processes are developed. The context section of tool includes five areas: the mission and managerial aspects; the care of the spaces; professional resources; the network work and the educational framework. The Accompaniment concerns dimensions of educational processes and practices. The Accompaniment section includes seven areas: the process of child/youth's admission; the observation phase; the child/youth participation; the individual care plan; the evaluation process; the support and involvement of the family; the leaving care process. The improvement section allows services to identify priorities (strengths and weaknesses) in order to develop an improvement plan. For each area of the self-assessment tool there are: quality requirements; indicators and rating evaluation scales. The data collected showed the performance of the residential care services involved for each quality area and the index of discrimination of indicators. This first phase of validation of the tool will allow the research team to verify its effectiveness and validity of use. The research developments are the large-scale validation of the instrument and its possible diffusion at the national level.

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