US anti-social behaviour expert and preventative check-up specialist Tom Dishion told a London audience of children’s services experts, last night, that effective interventions were going more the way of good dentistry than of emergency healthcare.
Best known for his explanations of how adolescent peer groups escalate anti-social behaviour, Dishion is Director of the Child and Family Center at the University of Oregon. He was speaking at the annual lecture organised by the Dartington-i the former service design and prevention policy implementation arm of The Social Research Unit.
 
There were strong signals that prevention is a science growing in confidence, and that it needed to look less to medicine for a coherent treatment model, he argued.
 
“Too often we are urged towards a medical model, of diagnosing the ‘disease’ and treating it. I’m not sure that child and adolescent development in the context of family life is like that. It's more a case of health maintenance. It's like dental care. We all need a check-up and a little bit of help every now and then. I like to talk about health maintenance.”
 
The previous day he was in Birmingham speaking to senior staff in children’s services and partner organisations across the city. He was the latest among leaders in prevention science visiting the city as it plans and implements its Brighter Futures strategy - a £41m investment in prevention and early intervention activity.

 
See: Think once, think twice – get ready to stop

The Social Research Unit at Dartington is an independent charity working to improve outcomes for children and families. Click here to learn about three opportunities to reduce the impact of public sector cuts on children's well-being. 

It is an acknowledged leader in helping local authorities to implement evidence-based programmes with fidelity, targeted to those who need them most.
 
Improvements in the technology available to the Social Research Unit means that it is now possible to calculate, with reasonable accuracy, the impact of competing investment strategies on child outcomes and public expenditure.
 
Local authority children’s services will suffer significant reductions in expenditure over the next five years. The Social Research Unit is seeking partners to test three approaches that link lower investment with improved child outcomes.
 
The first uses local government and private sector investment in cost-beneficial evidence-based programmes to offset rising need;
 
The second provides the governance arrangements for the local authority to share financial responsibility for children with local community leaders, charities and social enterprises;
 
The third radically reduces the number of children in expensive foster care provision to support the investment in cost-beneficial evidence-based programmes.
 
In each case, the impact on child well-being and local authority budgets will be closely monitored. The initiatives all link with central government interests in:

• ·       Breaking the cycle of deprivation;
• ·       Improving the quality of evidence used to inform public sector investment decisions;
• ·       The ‘Big Society’  

Click on the following PDF attachment to learn more. 

The West Midlands Regional Safeguarding Board has highlighted Birmingham's work to introduce evidence-based programmes and cost-benefit analysis to Children's Services at its first regional safeguarding awards ceremony.

The award  was in recognition of the Brighter Futures strategy, developed in collaboration with the Social Research Unit, and the way the City Council has strived to use high quality research evidence to inform their investment of £41m in prevention and early intervention activity.
 
This innovative approach represents a bold move on the part of politicians and senior officers at a time when the City Council has been under intense scrutiny following a series of damning reports on its social work services and the tragic and highly publicised death of seven-year-old Khyra Ishaq.
 
The Social Research Unit has supported the planning and implementation of Brighter Futures. It is currently evaluating three programmes and leading on developing the technology to support cost-benefit analysis.

Earlier this year, researchers Michael Little and Dwan Kaoukji had the opportunity to work with a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Ethiopia to help develop a service to prevent children from the risks of being sexual exploited.   

The unit contributed towards the design and evaluation of a new service aimed at reducing the number of children forced to migrate from rural areas to the capital city, Addis Ababa, because of difficult social and economical conditions. In many cases, these children are exploited by adults, forced into prostitution and exposed to severe risks to their health and development. 
 
The project was organised and facilitated by Childhope, a UK based charity working in partnership with ten NGOs across the developing world towards the protection of street and working children. One of these partners is an NGO based in Addis Ababa is Children Aid-Ethiopia (CHAD-ET), that provides services to children who have left their homes and rural villages to find work in the cities. Services include counseling, health care and vocational training to help children develop the skills needed to make a better life for themselves. 
 
Having recently secured funding, CHAD-ET and Childhope are working together to introduce a new prevention programme that seeks to change peoples’ attitude towards child migration. The unit will assist in developing a strategy for the service and evaluating its impact on reducing the number of child migrants.