Social Research Unit

Michael Little, co-director of the Unit, facilitates a panel discussion with conference speakers.

Working with the Gates Foundation to achieve lasting impact at scale!

January 27 2012

The Social Research Unit at Dartington recently published a report that describes their work with the Gates Foundation to support their effots to diffuse and disseminate family health innovations in low-income countries.

On November 1st and 2nd, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted a conference in their headuarters in Seattle, to discuss the challenges and opportunities for the widespread uptake of proven and emerging health innovations. The Unit facilitated these discussions, working alongside partners at Yale, Kaiser Permanente and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation members.

The objective of the meetings were to advance the science and practice of purposive spread of innovations and behavior change and thus contribute to improved health outcomes for women and children at a global scale.

As part of the Unit's commitment to this work, they have drafted a report that describes the event and ideas put forward during the conference. The report draws out points of connection and provides a regular clear explanations of emerging ideas and applications.

Following that, the Unit will meet again with the foundation, and other key partners at two meetings; one in Ethiopia, and the other in India to explore the processes of dissemination in different contexts.

In addition to regular summary reports on findings after each convening, the Unit will prepare an edited book summarizing the emerging direction of travel.

To find out more about this work, click on the following link: Achieving Lasting Impact at Scale. To download a copy of the report, please click on the attachment below.

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

Population shifts caused by social and emotional regulation programs

November 19 2010

Michael Little, co-director of the Social Research Unit presented a brief demonstration to head teachers in Nottingham of the effects of implementing social and emotional regulation programs into schools.

In November 2010, Michael Little met with head teachers from Nottingham Local Authority to describe what they can do to expect changes to children in their classroom. He highlighted the benefits of evidence-based programmes in achieving considerable impacts on outcomes.

Michael also went on to point out the relevance of evidence-based programmes in the current economic climate, particularly while resources are scarce. He drew on examples of the Units collaborative work with Birmingham City Council to introduce four evidence-based programmes across their city, and the experiences they faced. If implemented with fidelity, evidence-based programmes promise to achieve positive results, and are therefore far more beneficial to communities than programmes with no proven results. The evidence-base for these programs lies in the consistent positive results they've achieved after undergoing numerous randomized control trials.

The following video is a clip from Michael's presentation, and describes the effects of the PATHS programme in the US. PATHS stands for Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies, and was designed by Professor Mark Greenberg from Pennsylvania State University.

Please feel free to contact us for information about the presentation at dkaoukji@dartington.org.uk.

DEVELOPMENT

Lower costs, more benefits: Opportunities for partnering with the Unit to improve outcomes for children

October 05 2010

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.

DEVELOPMENT

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

August 19 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.

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.

DEVELOPMENT

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 11 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

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.

Article

Working with the Gates Foundation to achieve lasting impact at scale!

Event

The Unit invites you to hear Christina Salmivalli speak about reducing bullying

Blog

What I mean to say: fit for purpose