Chapter 9: An Evaluation of Dreams: Exploring the Assumption of a Participatory Evaluation of a Simulated Nursing Placement

This chapter explores the reflections of two evaluators on their use of a participatory approach to evaluate the impact of a simulated clinical placement on over 600 first-year undergraduate nursing students at a Post-92 Higher Education (HE) provider. Located in Northern England, over 70% of this large provider’s students have at least one characteristic identified by the Office for Students (OfS; the English HE regulator) that can potentially increase the risk of a student being unable to access or successfully participate in HE. This chapter’s case study interrogates ‘the quality and rigour’ of the evaluator’s performance from ‘the perspective of partners and personal biases’ (Bustos et al., 2024, p. 97). It describes an ostensibly failed evaluation, and we hope that an open and frank discussion about the challenges we experienced in conducting participatory evaluation in a HE context will support other evaluators in developing evaluation practices across the sector and encourage more in-depth thinking about how students can be engaged and participate in evaluation work.