MARS (ESYSIP)

EYSIP supports a diverse range of projects funded under a number of priority themes. As a funder, EYSIP has an obligation to demonstrate the effectiveness of its work. This means that it needs to be able to show that projects are engaging young people and reaching target groups.

To help us to demonstrate effectiveness, EYSIP requires that projects adopt a common framework for data collection. The Monitoring Action Research System has been developed to enable data to be gathered by a wide range of projects, and pulled together centrally, to give us an overall picture of projects’ activities.

What MARS is (and is not)

EYSIP recognises that the core activities of projects involve planning, reviewing, evaluating, and testing, in partnership with young people, as part of the action research process. The need to use the system should in no way compete with these priorities. MARS is intended to support EYSIP and individual projects in monitoring, but it does not replace any part of the action research process itself, which will generate a much broader range of evidence about young people’s experiences, views and engagement with projects.