The Guidebook is a resource for local leaders, commissioners and practitioners to use to inform their decisions about support for children and families in their area.
It has information about interventions that have at least preliminary evidence of achieving positive outcomes for children, for example, in relation to mental health, or behaviour or school attainment. It is not an exhaustive list of all effective interventions for children and families, and interventions which do not appear on the Guidebook may be effective. Conversely, the fact that an intervention appears on the Guidebook does not necessarily mean it will work in your local area.
The Guidebook aims to help you to find out more about effective interventions. It gives you details about the optimum conditions for implementing them and about the expected outcomes. It tells you about the relative strength of evidence for an intervention’s effectiveness, based on Foundations’ assessment of the evidence base.
Evidence is not enough on its own, of course. Local decision makers commissioning support for children, young people and families will also want to consider the population they serve, the outcomes that matter to them, the budget available for the intervention, and the specific features of the system in which they are working.
Reliable evidence helps you to understand the support that is the best match for the needs of children and families in your local area. It identifies approaches that have worked in the past and are good starting points for the future and helps you to decide where to spend your budget.
Use the Guidebook to find the right solutions to support children and families in your local area.
What’s on the Guidebook
To help you make decisions about the support that is the best fit for the children and families in your area, the Guidebook contains information on over 130 interventions that have had their impacts evaluated. Impact evaluations are studies that help us understand whether an intervention has had a measurable, positive effect on child outcomes.
For each intervention, the Guidebook has information about:
- The evidence that an intervention has achieved positive outcomes for children and families in the past
- The strength of the evidence – assessed and rated by our team in line with our evidence standards
- How the intervention can be implemented
- How much it costs compared to other programmes.
The Guidebook groups the evidenced outcomes of interventions across seven major outcomes that improve the chances that a child can thrive:
- Supporting children’s mental health and wellbeing
- Preventing child maltreatment
- Enhancing school achievement and employment
- Preventing crime, violence and antisocial behaviour
- Preventing substance abuse
- Preventing risky sexual behaviour
- Preventing obesity and promoting physical healthy development.
These outcome groups help you compare evidence across different interventions using a consistent framework.
It includes other things you need to know about interventions, such as how the intervention works and how it should be delivered. It tells you which children and families it is meant for, the setting it was delivered in, and the qualifications and training of the practitioners who delivered it.
The Guidebook has both UK-based and international interventions. One of our goals is to identify promising interventions that could be transferred to the UK, even if they are not currently available here.
