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This review began as a What Works for Children’s Social Care project to supplement the work of EIF (now both merged to form Foundations). The report does not provide sufficient evidence to suggest that virtual interventions are superior to face-to-face interventions in supporting families with children under the age of five years.
However, there was some evidence that virtual interventions may increase the efficacy of face-to-face support.
These findings are preliminary and further rigorous research is required. Further reviews are necessary to establish ‘what works for whom’ and in what circumstances, especially as the current findings do not reflect the demographic in the UK.
This rapid review was conducted by Cordis Bright to supplement an earlier review by the Early Intervention Foundation (EIF; now Foundations) and to help local authorities consider evidence-based options for their Family Hubs digital offer within the 2023 – 2025 time period.
The EIF review on virtual and digital interventions for children and young people was conducted as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite outlining potential to support children’s development, the review found little evidence that virtual and digital interventions are superior to face-to-face support and no study had revealed improvements in long term outcomes.
The purpose of this review was to identify specific virtual and digital interventions for children aged 0-5 and their families that local authorities might include as part of their Family Hubs offer within four priority areas:
This review aimed to address the gap in knowledge about virtual and digital interventions for families with a child aged 0-5 that could be offered by Family Hubs within the four priority areas.
This review primarily answered the following research questions:
The review also considers the following three questions where enough effective interventions were identified:
This rapid review was conducted under a limited timeframe through desk-based synthesis, and collated available research evidence using the following criteria:
The study design and search only included randomised controlled trial and quasi-experimental design studies in order to increase the likelihood of the studies examined having Level 3 evidence.
Given the limited timeframe, this rapid review does not provide sufficient evidence to suggest that virtual interventions are superior to face-to-face interventions in supporting families with children under the age of five years.
Of the seven studies which were deemed to meet the inclusion criteria, only two articles showed statistically significant evidence of impact. Both studies aligned with the Family Hub priority area on parenting support, demonstrating positive impacts on parenting practice:
Whilst two of the interventions did have rigorous evidence of positive impact, the evidence base is small, and as they were not based in the UK it is not possible to examine differences amongst participants across socio-economic groups or a range of protected characteristics such as ethnicity. It is also important to mention that the interventions identified in the review were compared to ‘usual care’ within the country, which varied markedly between studies making it hard to measure value-added.
Many of the included studies that did not show any statistically significant improvements in outcomes often discussed virtual and digital delivery of interventions as cost-effective and could increase reach to populations if used as accompanying tools to business-as-usual interventions. It is however worth mentioning that there was no evidence presented in this rapid review to support these claims.
Despite limited impacts on outcome measures, the review gathered that parents seem to enjoy the virtual and digital interventions as the acceptability, feasibility, and engagement were reported high and parents noted that they found them relatively easy to use.
This review found limited evidence to support the use of virtual and digital interventions for families of children under the age of five, nor did it find evidence to support the suggestion that they are superior to face-to-face interventions. However, the review did find some promising findings that a virtual or digital component can increase the efficacy of face-to-face support. This may suggest that services and interventions can be strengthened by including both face-to-face and virtual components to serve different community needs.
However, these findings are preliminary and further rigorous research is required before clear policy implications can be identified. Further reviews are necessary to establish ‘what works for whom’ and in what circumstances, especially as the current findings do not reflect the demographic in the UK.
Despite the mixed evidence findings in this rapid review, there are some important lessons to be learnt about virtual and digital interventions:
You can view the project linked to this publication here:
