What we mean by 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.