ABSTRACT
This chapter is an attempt to think through some of the problems and dilemmas I faced as the local evaluator of the Sheffield Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI)2 scheme that commenced as a fourth-round project in September 1986. The ‘Sheffield experience’, as documented elsewhere (see Nixon, 1987), is wide and varied; TVEI in Sheffield represents only one strand of a complex programme of Authoritywide curriculum change that is highly distinctive. Nevertheless, the Sheffield TVEI scheme is, in certain respects, typical of the way in which the later TVEI schemes have developed nationally, and, as such, raises issues that are common to other regional schemes and indeed to the evaluation of categorical funding programmes generally. Those issues, for the purposes of this chapter, focus on the emphasis within the regional TVEI schemes on the formative aspects of local evaluation; an emphasis which, given the political context within which local evaluators are obliged to operate, is highly problematic.
