The Social Research Unit will host it's annual lecture at the Royal Commonwealth Club on July 2009. Guest speakers include Professor Delbert S. Elliot, director of the Center for the Study of Prevention and Violence and Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado.

The murder of 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999, and the suicide of the two shooters, caused shock and consternation all over the world, spurring efforts to prevent similar catastrophic events. In the wake of the tragedy, the Columbine Review Commission made recommendations aimed at understanding, predicting and preventing violence in schools and communities. A decade later what can be said about progress in this area? The Social Research Unit at Dartington invites you to join them on Thursday, July 2 in London for the 2009 Dartington Annual Lecture: "Lessons from Columbine: Effective School-Based Violence Prevention Strategies and Programmes" to be given by Professor Del Elliott. The event, which is free of charge, will open with a reception at 5.30pm in the Commonwealth Club (25 Northumberland Avenue, London, WC2N 5AP) to be followed by the lecture from 6-8.00pm in the Commonwealth Club's auditorium. As space is limited, please reserve your free place as soon as possible by sending an email to lecture2009@dartington.org.uk or phoning Kay Turner or Rosanne Spalton at 01803 762400. Del Elliott is Director of The Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado. The Center is home to Blueprints for Violence Prevention, a project that has carried out rigorous scientific reviews of over 800 drug and violence prevention programmes and has certified 11 as having strong evidence of effectiveness and sustainability. His recent books include Good Kids from Bad Neighborhoods (2006) and Violence in American Schools (1998). He has won numerous awards for his extensive scientific and public service work, including the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention at the US Department of Justice.

A decade on from the killing of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado, the Social Research Unit has invited Del Elliott to give a series of lectures in England and Ireland this week.

Elliott, acknowledged expert in violence prevention, is the founder of Blueprints for Violence Prevention, the foremost database on evidence-based programs in this area. Blueprints emerged from the Columbine disaster.
 
While some looked for people to blame, Elliott and others searched for solutions. One set of solutions lay in what was known to hep reduce aggression, violence and other anti-social behavior in the school years.
 
The decade-long project has involved sifting through a large number of programs. As Elliott explained in his first presentation to the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter last Friday “we have come across over 700. But 80 per cent of them have no credible evaluation. And many of those with a robust evaluation find no impact. Some are even harmful. But then there are some that do work. And that is the focus of our work at Blueprints.”
 
Elliott will be giving presentations in Birmingham, Belfast and in London at the House of Commons this week. His visit culminates with the Social Research Unit’s Annual Lecture at the Commonwealth Club in London at 5.30 pm on Thursday 2nd July. Places are still available for the lecture. Application details are available on our events page.

Michelle Obama and Gordon Brown squeezed in visits to the House of Commons, yesterday, around a presentation to the growing UK prevention lobby by Social Research Unit guest Roger Weissberg.

Weissberg was in London to give a series of presentations on the contribution of social and emotional learning to child outcomes.
 
The event in the House of Commons was arranged by prevention advocate Graham Allen MP and attended by his Conservative ally Iain Duncan Smith MP.
 
Prior to the Commons meeting, Weissberg attended a lunch meeting of experts interested in establishing an organisation with capabilities similar to the US Collaborative for Academic and Social, Emotional Learning or CASEL.
 
He is a founder member and president of CASEL, which provides implementation and evaluation resources for school districts across the United States operating social and emotional learning curricula.
 
The Unit's interest in CASEL's work stems from its impact on child well-being. A recently published systematic review by Weissberg and Joe Durlak of over 700 experimental studies involving 270,000 children shows that the curricula reduce conduct disorders by 10 per cent and emotional disorders by nine per cent. More dramatically, the curricula drive up academic performance by 11 per cent. These impacts were felt by all children in a school.
 
Weissberg presented in Committee Room 14 of the House of Commons. Afterwards Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his parliamentary colleagues arrived in the midst of the lastest Govrnment crisis. At the other end of the Palace of Westminster, Michelle Obama and her children were on a private visit.
 
Weissberg is in England with his daughter Elizabeth, a philosophy graduate from Yale. Today he travels to Birmingham were the Social Research Unit is supporting the City's implementation and experimental evaluation of the social and emotional learning program, PATHS. On Wednesday he is meeting polcy makers and educators in Northern Ireland.
 
Download Weissberg's PowerPoint slides in PDF format to see his presentation.

Prevention Action was in Denver this week reporting on the biennial Blueprints for Violence Prevention conference. Blueprints is managed by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence and assesses programs according to independently agreed standards of evidence. 
 
Those that have been rigorously evaluated and can demonstrate positive effects are awarded model programme status. The week-long coverage includes stories about Big Brothers Big Sisters, Life Skills Training and an interview with Blueprints Editor Del Elliot. A brochure of the papers presented at the conference is available on their website. 
 
The next Blueprints conference will take place in March, 2010 in Denver, Colorado. 
 

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.

Our partnership with Birmingham City Council in the implementation of its Brighter Futures Strategy has taken a step forward with the formation of a multi-disciplinary service design group to oversee piloting of the Triple P parenting programme in the city.

Triple P is an evidence-based program to help parents to develop self-confidence and learn parenting techniques. The decision to implement it in Birmingham was made in the context of a ten year strategy that aims to make measurable improvements in children’s outcomes by investing in prevention and early intervention.
 
The service design group also includes representation from Birmingham early years service, the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services and the voluntary sector.

The Social Research Unit is governed by an independent charity, the Warren House Group at Dartington. The trustees are Roger Bullock (Emeritus Professor of Social Policy, Bristol), Jonathan Bradshaw (Professor of Social Policy, York), Lisa Christensen (Director of Children’s Services, Norfolk), Gillian Downham (Barrister, London) and Owen Keenan (Managing Director, Middlequarter Dublin).
 
Jonathan Bradshaw chairs an independent scientific review of the Unit’s work, which takes place every four years. The next is scheduled for the spring of 2012. In 2008 the team of scrutineers comprised Leon Feinstein (Department of Social Justice), Gordon Harold (Otago University) and Ian Sinclair (University of York).

Mark Greenberg, Director of the Prevention Research Center at Penn State University was given a senior award at the Society for Research in Child Development at its bi-ennial conference in Denver.

Greenberg was awarded alongside Nobel Laureate Jim Heckman for making a distinguished contribution to public policy for children. The 2009 SRCD conference was covered in a special edition of Prevention Action.

The effect on children’s development of catastrophe, disease, war and poverty and the astonishing resilience that enables some to endure the worst terrors are the focus of a new collection of papers co-edited by Unit researcher Dwan Kaoukji.

The effect on children’s development of catastrophe, disease, war and poverty and the astonishing resilience that enables some to endure the worst terrors are the focus of a new collection of papers co-edited by Social Research Unit researcher Dwan Kaoukji. To published in November, the book reviews children’s services in the global South and brings together latest reliable evidence. A contribution to the Ashgate Library of Essays in Child Welfare and Development, the international selection discusses the risks to child well-being and the interventions and aspects of good practice. Dwan Kaoukji’s partner is the project has been Najat M’jid, the director of BAYTI in Morocco, a non-profit organisation dedicated to housing street children and preventing the illegal migration of children to Europe. Both authors have had experience working in the developing world. Dwan has been at the Unit since 2006 and is writing a Phd on the processes that connect international NGOs with local communities working with children in the global South.