Over the past decade, Ireland has demonstrated strong commitment to enhancing outcomes for children and young people. In a recently published report, Together for Children and Young People in Ireland: Towards a New Governance Framework, the OECD assesses Ireland’s recent policy, institutional and legislative developments and presents a series of recommendations to strengthen policy and governance arrangements for tackling child poverty and improving outcomes for children and young people.

This report accompanies the main report and provides guidance for the development of a Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) system for Ireland’s new national policy framework for children and young people for 2023‑28, Young Ireland. The report details the sequence of steps that should be considered when developing a robust results-based M&E system, building on international good practice examples and the indicator set developed for Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures (BOBF), Ireland’s national policy framework for children and young people for the period 2014‑20.

Comprehensive results-based M&E systems are a key public management tool to help policy makers track progress and demonstrate the impact generated by a particular policy or intervention. M&E systems can assist in formulating policy goals, identifying promising practices, detecting programme weaknesses and potential actions to correct those. They are also useful to promote transparency and accountability of policy making.

While BOBF did not plan for the design and implementation of a comprehensive M&E framework, certain elements of its indicator set could be useful cornerstones for the design of a results-based M&E system. In particular, BOBF’s indicator set has a wide range of indicators at the outcome level that could be integrated as part of the results framework of the M&E system. The extensive consultative approach through which BOBF was developed is another asset and could help to build a broad consensus. Dedicated human and financial resources were put in place for BOBF, and progress has been made in capacity building for M&E since the adoption of BOBF. Finally, Ireland has a legal framework that encourages data openness and transparency in the public sector, which resulted in regular reports on lessons learnt in the monitoring of BOBF and, in more recent years, the development of additional dissemination strategies.

The OECD considers that these elements could serve Ireland as steppingstone for developing a formal results-based M&E system for the new policy framework on children and young people. This M&E system would allow the systematic monitoring and tracking of progress and performance of the new policy framework. For the development of this M&E system, the OECD recommends Ireland to consider:

• Designing an M&E system that builds on an explicit and comprehensive formulation of the logic of change underpinning the policy framework.

• Identifying and defining SMART (i.e., Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time bound) indicators for all levels of the results chain to support the M&E functions of the new policy framework.

• Allocating sufficient and appropriate human and financial resources for the development of the M&E system of the policy framework.

• Developing a comprehensive communication and dissemination strategy for M&E findings.

The report provides concrete proposals for each of these recommendations, building on existing indicators and international good practice examples.