Unit brings Blueprints to the House of Commons

Del Elliott concluded his lecture tour in England and Ireland organised by the Social Research Unit with presentations in the House of Commons and the Royal Commonwealth Society.

Del Elliott concluded his lecture tour in England and Ireland organised by the Social Research Unit with presentations in the House of Commons and the Royal Commonwealth Society.His presentation in the Commons was attended not only by members of parliament from both major parties, but also central and local government leaders plus representatives of third sector organisations such as Catch 22 and Demos working to promote evidence based practice in the UK.
 
At the meeting chaired by Graham Allen, MP, Elliott commended the UK on its efforts to introduce evidence based programmes into mainstream systems, in Birmingham for example. He noted that there is no comparable innovation in the United States.
 
In the Annual Social Research Unit lecture at the Commonwealth Society, Elliott talked about the knee-jerk responses to crises, and how they seldom lead to better outcomes. After the Columbine disaster there was a lot of ‘target hardening’, such as metal detectors. “We are turning some of our school into fortresses” remarked Elliott. “That is not healthy for children’s development”. In fact, in the Virginia Tech shooting, the security served to make some students captive for the gunman.
 
The presentation, reported in today’s edition of Prevention Action, and summarised in the slides below, put a lot of consideration into the kinds of efforts -such as a hotlines for people to report their concerns- that can helpfully sit around evidence based programs.
 
He ended by asking whether, 10 billion dollars and a decade later, are schools safer? Most of the money has gone into hardware, like the metal detectors.
 
There has been a slight fall over the 10 years in the number of young people carrying a gun, but still five per cent of students have carried a gun in the last 30 years. Many other indices of violence are similarly depressing.
 
Why not? Elliott suggested that school performance is more important that violence prevention. “They don’t seem to realise that children feeling safe correlates highly with good test results’.
 
“There is still a lot of confusion about standards of evidence, so people think they are implementing an evidence based program when in fact they are not. They don’t know which list to turn to”.
 
“Then there are the standard problems of politics and parochial judgement trumping research, and the failure to implement programs with fidelity”.