Deputy Chief Executive Donna Molloy shares more about the new Foundations Guidebook, and the role it plays in helping decision makers improve outcomes for children and families.
This blog first appeared on Children & Young People Now.
Today, we’ve launched the new Foundations Guidebook – a free online tool to help more children and families receive evidence-based support.
This is a time of change for children and families who need support.
The Department of Education’s reforms are coming in the shape of the national drive to transform end-to-end services, from Family Hubs to more targeted family help and child safeguarding. The government’s local devolution plan aims to help councils focus on prevention in public services and build support around people and the places where they live.
Government has highlighted the role of evidence in delivering reform for good reason – we know that evidence-based approaches are the most reliable way to improve outcomes for children and families. That matters because better evidence means more children can get the support that works for them – when and where they need it.
But finding out what works for children and families is not easy, and accessing and using evidence isn’t always straightforward. There is an array of different types of evidence available, but it can be hard to know which research is most reliable. Sometimes it’s not easy to find or to understand what the evidence tells us about how to meet the needs of specific local communities.
That’s why we’ve launching the new Foundations Guidebook.1 One of the key roles of a What Works Centre is to provide an accessible online toolkit that translates complex research findings into usable formats. In short, to play our part to put evidence into action.
The Guidebook is a resource for local decision makers and practitioners, national policy makers and researchers. It rates existing research on over 130 interventions with at least preliminary evidence of improving children and families’ outcomes from early intervention for children and families to children’s social care. It details the relative strength of evidence for an intervention’s effectiveness based on our rigorous assessment of the evidence base. It also allows users to compare interventions easily and see quickly which of seven major outcomes it works for, ranging from supporting children’s mental health to preventing harm, and promoting school attainment.
One of the most frequent questions from local decision makers is how a particular approach might work in their area for the children and families they work with. The Guidebook helps to answer this with details about who interventions are designed for as well as how they have been delivered and the best conditions for implementing them. It also includes for the first time information about race and ethnicity as reported by the studies we evaluate.
But as ever there are no magic bullets. Even the best evidenced intervention won’t work everywhere, and what works evidence can’t tell you what to do or how to do it locally. Impact evidence is not enough on its own to make decisions about the right kind of support for children and families. It needs to be combined with local expertise and knowledge to enable wider considerations, including how a service will meet the needs of the local population, if children and families are likely to want to access it or if there is a suitably trained workforce to deliver it. We also want to keep learning from children and young people themselves because their experiences and insights matter in shaping what comes next.
That’s why the new Foundations Guidebook is just one part of our Toolkit. The Toolkit brings together the Guidebook with the Practice Guide series. It combines the Guidebook’s information about interventions that make a difference to children and families’ outcomes, with recommendations in the Practice Guides about how to put evidence-based support into action. The Toolkit aims to make using evidence a routine part of commissioning, designing and delivering support for children and families for local leaders, commissioners and practitioners. It helps local leaders use evidence when choosing which services to fund and deliver.
The Foundations Guidebook is only part of the picture when it comes to transforming support for children and families, but it is a crucial part. Our next step is a series of events to introduce the Guidebook and Toolkit to local leaders and demonstrate how it can be put into practice.
In the summer, we will go further and announce a new comprehensive offer to help embed evidence and support local areas and regions to build a connected culture of evidence use.
Together we want to create new ways to engage decision makers, support the design of services and share how evidence informs improvements, in step with the drive to bring about the change we all want to see for children and families.
- The Foundations Guidebook is a new, updated version of the Early Intervention Foundation’s (EIF) Guidebook. ↩︎
