Social Research Unit

A young boy stands at the doorway to his home in the Koro-Abili IDP Camp, Uganda.

BBC Radio 4 investigates the impact of early interventions for children, in flagship news programme

August 23 2010

BBC Radio 4’s flagship news programme, The World Tonight, is investigating how evidence-based early intervention schemes for children can provide significant opportunities for the UK government.

Its objective is to maximise effectiveness and make major long-term savings, during a period of intense scrutiny on public expenditure

Three reports by journalist Charlotte Aston are being transmitted on 17th, 20th and 24th August during the programme’s 10.00-10.45pm slot. The first report, aired on 17th August, featured comments from the Director of the Social Research Unit, Michael Little. The piece also profiled a programme on which the Social Research Unit is currently working – the £47 million Brighter Futures in Birmingham, which is focused on improving outcomes for children and young people in the city.

To listen to The World Tonight broadcast from 17th August, visit this page. A news article on the early intervention reports is also available on the BBC website.

Developing a strategy that merits an award

June 01 2010

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.

DEVELOPMENT

Unit backs Birmingham’s 2-1 benefit hopes

May 13 2010

The Unit's collaboration with Birmingham City Council to defend costs and demonstrate the benefits of implementing new programmes in the city is described in the latest newsletter from Social and Emotional Learning Update.

Of the five, two are among the “model” programmes selected by the US Blueprints for Violence Prevention standards agency. They include the Incredible Years parents and teachers training series and Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS). The extent of Birmingham's interest in social and emotional learning makes it unusual among English cities.

The Social Research Unit has been helping to ensure that the programmes are carried out with fidelity to their original designs, and to evaluate their impact on children’s wellbeing. In addition, the partnership has been developing a cost-benefit model to guarantee a maximum return on the £47 million investment.

The target payback is £100 million over the next ten years. The newsletter can be accessed on the Social and Emotional Learning Update website. For more information about the story, follow this link.

DEVELOPMENT

The Unit goes to Addis Ababa

January 31 2010

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.

DEVELOPMENT

Practising what practice preaches

November 11 2009

Our collaboration with Birmingham City Council in piloting the PATHS social education programme as part of its Brighter Futures strategy has attracted national press notice, this week.

Coverage in The Guardian of Mark Greenberg's visit from the US Prevention Research Center where PATHS originated, focused on the programme’s introduction to Starbank Primary, one of 30 elementary schools involved in the first UK trial.

Correspondent Rachel Williams linked the activity to efforts to raise the quality of social care in the city in the wake of a critical review and the national fallout from the Baby Peter scandal in Haringey.

She quoted incoming director of children's social care, Colin Tucker, as believing that training, recruitment and retention, as well as openness, were key to achieving substantial improvements.

Tucker spent nine years on the social work front line, and has done regular duty shifts since taking over in Birmingham four months ago.

No-one would expect consultant paediatricians to have much influence over general practitioners, did they not have first hand experience of life on the front line, he told the paper.

“My staff expect and deserve a social worker to be at a director level. They need to know I'm a social worker at heart. And I need to know what they're doing.”

DEVELOPMENT

Brighter Futures cross Irish Sea

November 06 2009

The city of Birmingham's experience as a testbed for a comprehensive early intervention strategy, and the Social Research Unit's contribution to its design and evaluation were explained to Stormont Executive members, last week.

Unit director Michael Little and Tony Howell, Strategic Director, Children, Young People and Families in Birmingham were guest speakers at a seminar hosted by Barnardos and the Office of the Northern Ireland First Minister and Deputy First Minister.

It focused on how best to allocate public resources to improve the prospects of children and young people. Birmingham’s Brighter Futures strategy provided a case study.

Junior Minister, Sinn Féin MLA Gerry Kelly said: "We recognise the very real benefits that can be realised through providing timely and targeted interventions, most importantly for the young people involved – but also for the economic benefits that be achieved by such practices."

His Democratic Unionist counterpart MLA Robin Newton said: "We realise that there are no quick fixes. We must raise awareness, at all levels, of the need to re-evaluate our spending. The cost of investment at an early stage can be much less than the cost of tackling problems, which may later emerge if action hasn’t been taken early enough."

DEVELOPMENT

The grand view of do-it-yourself

October 12 2009

Ways of helping policy makers to grasp research principles in their efforts to assemble a picture of the health and development of the children for whom they are responsible are described in a forthcoming Research Unit paper.

A few years ago the big test for social research was finding reliable ways to get new findings into practice; now worthwhile dissemination is much more a matter of giving grassroots practice command of its own routine research.

Similarly, robust sampling strategies used to be the preserve of scientists, but, increasingly, local authorities need to understand the methods in order to make evidence-informed decisions about the wellbeing of children.

The principles of representativeness, sampling and user engagement are all discussed in Tim Hobbs's "Looking for a Grand View," which will be published shortly in the International Journal of Social Research Methodology.

DEVELOPMENT

Parents screened for the Incredible Years

June 22 2009

The Social Research Unit has begun collecting data from parents for its first randomised control trial of the Incredible Years programme in Birmingham.

The Incredible Years BASIC programme (IY) is set to launch in September 2009, as part the Brighter Futures Strategy to improve children's behaviour in the city.

Incredible Years is a training programme for parents of children between the ages of three to four years who may suffer from behavioural difficulties. It is one of three evidence-based programmes piloted this year. Others include the Triple-P parenting programme and the PATHS curriculum.

Six Children Centers have been selected to participate in the Incredible Years pilot, and will receive training to deliver the 14-week parenting programme with fidelity. The Social Research Center has been commissioned to evaluate the effectiveness of the programme in improving parenting skills and reducing child’s behaviour problems through randomised control trials.

The screening and primary outcomes measure for the study will be conducted through parent completed measures, mainly the parents' Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), to assess social, emotional and behavioural problems. Another data collection is set to take place in 6 months after the programme has been implemented to measure change in the results.

DEVELOPMENT

Birmingham's brighter future goes on trial

July 20 2009

Investigations into whether two widely implemented, evidence-based parenting programs can improve the lives of children and families in Birmingham UK are gathering pace, this week, as the Unit launches randomised controlled trials in the city.

Fieldwork has begun for the evaluation of The Incredible Years and Triple P – two among several programmes being introduced as part of Brighter Futures, Birmingham’s five-year children’s services strategy.

Brighter Futures aims to improve children's outcomes by investing less in treatment and more in prevention and early intervention. Fieldwork for another randomised controlled trial evaluation – of the PATHS programme in schools – is expected to begin in September.

For more information about the Unit’s Birmingham initiative, visit the Projects page or see Forward! Brighter Futures program gets the green light at www.preventionaction.org.

DEVELOPMENT

Incredible Years manual created for Brighter Futures

June 09 2009

A manual to guide the implementation of the Incredible Years BASIC parenting programme in Birmingham, UK, has been completed.

The manual is aimed at the Children's Centre managers and staff involved in implementing the programme but will also help other stakeholders – parents, teachers, local services, policy makers – understand what the intervention is about.It describes what Incredible Years seeks to do and how, and explains why the programme is being implemented in Birmingham.

The manual also provides guidance on implementation, covering subjects such as training and supervision, parent recruitment and delivering the course with a multi-lingual group. The final chapter sets out how the evaluation will work. The manual does not replace the programme materials but rather accompanies them.

Incredible Years is a parent training programme. It helps children who may have difficulties with their behaviour, such as temper tantrums, being impulsive or unable to concentrate, disobedient or defiant, bullying or fighting with other children. It has been implemented in most states in the US and also in parts of the UK, Canada, Norway and Ireland. It is being implemented in Birmingham in a pilot project and evaluated to a high standard. If the results are positive, it is hoped to roll it out across the city.

The Incredible Years programme is aimed at parents of children aged 3-4 who live near these centres and who feel that they would benefit from having some help in managing their children’s behaviour.

DEVELOPMENT

Open wide – get ready to stop

April 30 2009

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

DEVELOPMENT

We do not undertake research purely for the sake of science. We regard it as fundamental to improving how a society brings up its children.

We want to help communities and children’s services agencies to use research evidence in their decision making. So, when we speak about development, we mean developing evidence to make it useful to those who raise children.

Two convictions lie at the heart of our approach to translating evidence into policy and practice: that good ideas have more chance of being adopted if the people who implement them are involved developing them, and that any idea can only be as good as the data on which it is based.

Reliable information about the health and development of the children whose lives we want to improve and evidence about what works, for whom, when and why are particularly important. Combining the interests of a variety of stakeholders and bringing evidence to bear on policy and practice require involving people who use of similar words often denotes quite different things.

Our strategy for overcoming this danger is called Common Language. It engenders a common purpose and collective understanding of the role of evidence in changing children’s lives.

Development activity has been undertaken on a large scale, for example in major reforms of children’s services in Ireland and Birmingham, as well as being directed towards improving the lives of individual children, for example though devising screening and assessment methods.

As a result, we have expertise in implementing evidence-based programmes, such as PATHS, The Incredible Years and Triple P. Increasingly, cost-benefit evidence is being incorporated ino our work.

The long-term aim is to improve child outcomes at zero net cost to central and local government.

Every idea to improve children’s lives must be treated as a hypothesis and tested before it is widely applied, and so we sponsor numerous experimental service evaluations.

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BBC Radio 4 investigates the impact of early interventions for children, in flagship news programme

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SRU Annual Lecture 2010

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