Khulisa is a UK-based charity which aims to provide young people affected by trauma and adversity, or at risk of exclusion and imprisonment, with the social and emotional skills and wellbeing support they need to thrive. With strong experience of empowering change in schools, prisons and in the community, Khulisa is unique in delivering a joined-up approach to breaking exclusion cycles through their whole community approach which combines direct support for young people with training for the staff, parents and carers around them. 

Khulisa is particularly committed to evidencing and understanding the impact of their programmes, which is the reason for their partnership with ImpactEd Evaluation. They already have a proven track record in improving participants’ wellbeing and social and emotional skills alongside a reduction in exclusion and negative behaviour and are keen to further understand the impact of their work.

Working with schools
In schools, Khulisa works holistically to support at-risk young people by offering intensive support and by providing training for the professionals, parents and carers around them in creating trauma-informed environments for young people. ImpactEd Evaluation is currently partnering with Khulisa on evaluations of two of their key programmes in schools:

1. An evaluation of their ‘Face it’ small-group therapeutic interventions
2. An evaluation of their ‘Whole School Approach’ programme pilot

Both evaluations make use of the School Impact Platform to easily collect pupil data on non-cognitive outcomes and demographics, as well as school-held data such as exclusions and attendance.

‍Measuring the impact of small-group interventions  

The 'Face It' evaluation is being used to measure the impact of Khulisa’s therapeutic interventions on behaviour, exclusions and attendance. The evaluation structure allows staff to easily and safely administer surveys to the small groups of students participating in the six-week intervention, and to quickly duplicate the process for each new 'Face It' cohort. Currently, ImpactEd Evaluation is using platform capabilities to pull through existing data from participating schools on behaviour, exclusions and attendance in order to measure the effectiveness of the programme in these areas. 

The Interim Report of the ‘Face It’ programme, completed by ImpactEd Evaluation in July 2022, reported on nine participating cohorts and indicated that the programme had significant benefits for participating young people. The final report will be created in mid-end 2023.  

Measuring the impact of large-scale, whole school approaches
Khulisa’s ‘Whole School Approach’ aims to pilot the implementation of a trauma-informed and nurturing educational environment at a whole school level. This is enacted through a combination of small-group student interventions, combined with training for school professionals and parents/carers. This aims to ultimately result in more inclusive, nurturing schools and communities built on improved relationships between young people (who have developed their social and emotional skills) and the adults in their lives (who have the skills to better respond to challenging behaviour). 

Khulisa are also using the School Impact Platform to facilitate user-friendly data collection from schools and pupils. Next to this, ImpactEd Evaluation is also collecting a range of qualitative data for the overall evaluation of the programme in order to fully understand the impact and implementation of the programme on a variety of stakeholders.

You can hear more about the findings from Khulisa's two-year evaluation of the Face It programme conducted with ImpactEd in this discussion between their CEO and Impact Lead for this project, as well as their route to undertaking this evaluation and what they have learned from it.