How do you measure the benefits of "soft-outcome" work when results are often hard to quantify?
At heart, work with children and young people is always about the development of the whole person: engendering confidence, curiosity or social responsibility. Whatever our respective field, we help cultivate what was poetically defined by Aristotle as "eudaimonia" or human flourishing. We create opportunities for the growth of happy, healthy children.
However, human flourishing is notoriously hard to measure. The learning gleaned from mentoring may not bear fruit until later life, when principles marry with experience. Cognitive and behavioural changes are hard to weigh with numbers. Learning cannot always be prescribed or predicted and service users have the freedom to determine their own, sometimes unpredictable, outcomes.
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