evaluation – Support from the Start

Are We Getting it Right ?

Getting through my ‘to read file’ – this time going back to the fascinating parliamentary review by the finance committee of early years interventions

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/s3/committees/finance/reports-11/fir11-01.htm

The committee members had quite a challenge to absorb the depth of information / evidence provided verbally and in writing to the committee. Reviewing some of the evidence offered to the committee really make you ask the question – Are we getting it right for children in Scotland. Scandinavian countries have been in the news a lot for the wrong reasons in the last few weeks – but their investment in children clearly pays off in improved outcomes. For example

Sweden’s strong focus on prevention starts at the very beginning of life with emphasis on breastfeeding (98% of Swedish mothers begin breast-feeding and 72% have maintained this at 6 months vs 79% and 22% in the UK). In addition long periods of maternity and parental leave support attention to the needs of the child in its earlier months. 100% of hospitals have BFHI (baby-friendly) status (compared with less than 10% in the UK) and early parent training is provided for a high proportion of the population.

What Works in Early Years Education, a review of approaches to Early Years Education across the globe, cites two international comparisons of academic performance in English schools, in one case with Slovenia, in the other case with Switzerland. Though the Slovenian children started school two years later, within 9 months they had caught up on English mathematics attainment. The Swiss children started school a year later than those in England, yet the Swiss one year younger than English children performed better in maths. A study which addressed why this was the case identified the variable academic ability of children in the English reception class.

However, one report given to the committee as evidnece stood out for me because it chimed so strongly with the ethos of Support from the Start – It is a report from an organsation called the Wave Trust which has produced a comprehensive review of international evidence on violence reduction. It gives the following six success factors in improving social & health outcomes.

1. Those who prioritise investment in the earliest years secure the best outcomes

2. The quality of parenting/care is the key to a successful society

3. There could be a major dividend from focused commitment to ensure children arrive at school ‘school ready’

4. The impact of poor early care can be alleviated by the right experience during school years

5. Galvanising the community is the secret of success

6. Innovative approaches to social care can provide significant benefits at minimum cost

We know that many of Scotland’s closest neighbours are so much better at improving outcomes for its citizens, and this reports emphasises that, but it also give a clue about what can be done to change it. The success factors / key messages they outline are relatively simple but they need to be applied systematically and need relentless leadership in pursuing them. They also need Scotlands citizens to be engaged and demanding better services for children.

Steven Wray

Readiness to learn – supporting parents to establish home learning

Another one in my ‘too read file’ – and this one was really worth the effort. Its finding are quite hopeful in that it highlights that sometimes small changes in practise, culture and thinking can potentially have big impacts.

This is the report of a major study, released earlier this month, which examined how nurseries and other early years settings can better support parents wanting to develop their children’s learning at home.

The Family and Parenting Institute, in partnership with the Campaign for Learning, conducted the study to identify which strategies are most effective in supporting parents to give their child the strongest educational start in life.

The findings identify best practice, help quantify the benefits of support to parents, and offer suggestions about how to make best use of resources at a time of financial constraint.

The study, named Provider Influence on the Home Learning Environment, was commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (now the Department for Education) and released on July 4, 2011.

You can read the study here.

Thanks to Anne Rooney Planning Manager at Midlothian Council for highlighting this report

Parenting and health inequality

Attended a 1/2 day conference held by the Growing Up in Scotland team earlier this week. The session was led off by the new early years minister Angela Constance and one phrase in her speech caught my attention in particular.

As parents its what we do, not who we are, that is most important.

By which I think she meant that parents who are facing adversity in the form of poverty or poor health can do as good a job as parents who aren’t facing the same adversity. I think we all know that to be true, or at least we want it to be true.

However, it is also true that many parents do become overwhelmed by the adversity they face in bringing up children. Talking to some head teachers in the last week or so has highlighted this for me. In the run up to the summer holidays many parents and children face the summer holidays not with a sense of joy and opportunity, but with with a sense of foreboding -‘how am I going to cope without the structure that school and nursery provides’. For many children this fear is expressed in terms of their behaviour in school, and for the child protection system I suspect it is reflected in the number of Initial Referral Discussions that take place in the run up to the summer holidays. ( I would guess that the economic climate is making the summer holiday period even harder for some parents this year?)

Services are responding with partnership approaches to supporting families over the summer period. In Midlothian Equally well champions are using their development fund to support a project called ‘Play in the Park’ which has been developed in the Woodburn community over a number of years, and will extend it to the neighbouring community in Mayfield, they are also exploring ways of further supporting transition from nursery to P1. In East Lothian champions are currently discussing whether to support for a second year a Summer transition programme supporting parents of children who are moving from nursery to P1 who need some additional support

Talking about parenting skills always makes me a bit twitchy, partly because even if nobody is else is making judgements about me as a parent I cant’ help making judgement about myself. For the same reason I have never felt completely comfortable with parenting courses / programmes which are the focus of many parenting strategies. More fundamentally than doubts about my own performance I also wonder whether parenting programmes over emphasise the individual parent behaviours rather than the wider family and community support that is fundamental to good parenting. It is easier to be consistent with rules, be positive and affirmative and to have a good attachment or connection with your child / children if you feel supported as a parent and can access a network of practical and emotional resources. Angela Constance also spoke about the development of a national parenting strategy for Scotland which was a manifesto commitment for the SNP. I for one hope that it is as strategy for family support as much as a strategy for developing parenting skills.

The GUS team have made a particular study of parenting skills and their relationship with health and a presentation on the findings is linked here There is also an audio file of the presentation from Dr Alison Parkes on the GUS website. The slides are quite complex so the audio file is well worth listening to.

Growing Up in Scotland

The latest findings of a study shining a spotlight on the realities of life as a child in Scotland were published this week.

Launched in 2005, the Growing Up in Scotland study (GUS) gathers the experiences of 14,000 children and their families including attitudes towards children’s services, parenting, childcare, healthcare and education.

This round of reports is the fifth set in a longitudinal study which explores a range of issues experienced by children in the first five years of their lives. The reports cover a range of issues including parenting and child health, cognitive development, service use and support, and the impact of significant events.

The findings include:

· During the first five years of their lives, around one in ten children in Scotland experience their parents separating, with the incidence being highest in the first two years after the child’s birth. Separation increased the likelihood of mothers experiencing poor mental health and low income, both known drivers of child outcomes.

· The gap in cognitive abilities between children from more and less advantaged social backgrounds found at age 3 persists at age 5. The largest differences in ability are between children whose parents have higher and lower educational qualifications. Factors such as a rich home learning environment had a positive influence on the improvement of cognitive ability in the pre-school period.

· Mothers living in disadvantaged circumstances are more reluctant to engage with services aimed at supporting parents with young children and are less likely to make use of such services. Informal support by family and friends was used equally by those with different levels of service use.

· Child health and health behaviours are less favourable in families experiencing adversity. However, good parenting was found to have a positive impact on child health. This suggests that parenting support could go some way in reducing health inequalities.

In the reports one quote caught my eye in particular :

The positive impact of infant-maternal attachment on improvement in relative language ability was specific to children whose parents have lower qualifications. This implies that the overall negative effect on cognitive development associated with a lack of parental qualifications can be limited somewhat by improving early infant-maternal attachment.

This point jumped out at me because many of the other findings in the report were rather depressing in that they confirmed the picture of inequality without pointing at means of breaking the cycle of inequalities. We know that attachment can be improved and that their are interventions some of them relatively simple that can improve attachment behaviours between babies and significant adults even before the babies are born. Similarly the report highlights the benefits of positive parenting behaviours, and the need for good informal networks that parents can access when the going gets tough all things that we can make it easier for individual parents to achieve or access with good services and open caring communities.

‘Healthy Happy Bairns’

The output from a year long evaluation study led by the Queen Margaret Univerity ChangexChange team is linked below.

Healthy Happy Bairns FINAL INTERNET VERSION

The evaluation found that Support from the Start has created significant outcomes for children and their families. Children had new-found confidence, improved social relationships, were better equipped to cope with change, were more ready for school, and benefited from a more structured and more settled day and family life. Parents involved improved their relationships with their children, were more able to avoid significant mental health issues, were less stressed and more able to cope with life events, had increased personal confidence, and were able to find support from extended social networks.

We are confident that ‘Healthy Happy Bairns’ will be a source of ideas and inspiration for a range of professionals and organisations seeking to make a difference to health inequalities in the early years. We would recommend that practitioners, managers and leaders take the learning and use it to make the changes required to create a positive impact in the early years experience of all children, so that they can secure a stable, healthy and happy future.

What have we been doing & where have we been?

The link below will take you to a document that attempts to describe what has been happening as a result of the Equally Well test site in East Lothian and the rationale behind that activity. It is a report to the National Programme for Equally Well on the two years in which the test site has been in operation.

The report is not an evaluation of Support from the Start, it simply seeks to tell the story of what we have been doing and why.

I will, however, shortly be able to post the outcome of an evaluation of Support from the Start in East Lothian, which was taken forward by a Queen Margaret University. The evaluation was delivered using an innovative approach that develops a local partnership linked to academic support to make sure that evaluation is both relevant and rigorous. Two East Lothian practitioners – John Boyce and Ann Hume – were seconded part time to the university to work with a ‘firefly’ team led by Professor Kirsty Forsyth. They carried out a number of focus groups with parents that had been involved in champion led developments and initiatives, as well as completing a survey of champions. The output from the evaluation includes a resource for practitioners and planners who might want to use some of the approach and ideas that have been used in the test site. The resource is called healthy, Happy Bairns from a comment made by one of the parents involved in the focus groups. Watch this space

Test site report to Scottish government National Programme for Equally Well

Champions development fund

Service & Community champions are a key part of Support from the Start, they are people with an interest in health, equality and the early years from across a wide range of services.

Champions have access to shared learning (action learning) and a small peer reviewed development fund. Many exciting project have been taken forward by the champions using this fund – but this by no means represents the total of initiatives that champions have taken forward only those for which they have used development funds. A link to a monitoring rport for the fund over the financial year 2010 – 2011 is below –

Summary 2010 2011 (4)

Can we support parents ante-natally to improve attachment post birth?

Penny Rackett educational psychologist from Norfolk was invited to talk about her research into interventions before birth that are designed to enhance attachment once the child is born.

Penny gave a presentation to a wide range of practitioners and managers at a twilight seminar on Thursday 3rd February and the next day met with the members of a Support from the Start working group looking at a range of initiatives and training needs around utilising recent research and development on attachment theory.

The first presentation below reviews current research on what works in attachment theory and practise. The second presentation reviews research on assessment of attachment behaviours ante-natally.

East Lothian presentation 1

Assessment

National learning from test sites

An evaluation of the eight Equally Well test sites is being undertaken for the Scottish Government and Health Scotland. The evaluation is focusing on what contributes to service redesign as this is somenting that unites all of the test sites, which are working on different themes.

The first of a series of ‘Learning Notes’ has been issued by the researchers and it can be found below

Learning Note 1 – September 2010

If you want to know more about the other Equally Well test sites visit the national social networking site at http://equallywell.ning.com/

Changexchange – Evaluating the Impact of Support from the Start

Changexchange is a collaborative research project consisting of practitioners from NHS Lothian and East Lothian Council working alongside academics from Queen Margaret University. Those involved are John Boyce, NHS Lothian, Ann Hume, East Lothian Council, Prof Kirsty Forsyth and Donald Maciver, both Queen Margaret University.

The overall aim of Changexchange is to understand how communities deliver sustainable change to reduce health inequalities in early years.

Many initiatives have developed under the auspices of Support from the Start, each with a focus on addressing the health and well-being of some of our youngest children and their families. The main aim has been to facilitate and enable mainstream services to deliver support in a different way and share the learning from this.

The key to ensuring long term change in service delivery is to establish what has made a difference both to practitioners and to those who are in receipt of the service.

The Changexchange project will seek to evaluate the impact of these initiatives by identifying changes which have taken place both within families, practice and service delivery. Information will be gathered by a variety of research methods including questionnaires, focus groups and individual interviews.

The output from this research will highlight changes which have taken place within families, staff, communities and organisations, detailing examples of good practice where appropriate, and will be used to inform future service delivery.

The methodolgy used to gather this qualitative data will involve questionnaires issued to all our champions, individual interviews with a selection of champions, and focus groups involving participants in some of the change initiatives.

The first stage in this process has involved gathering information on “Good News Stories” which are initiatives that are already having an impact. These are attached below in one document.

We are about to launch into our data gathering phase so will be kept very busy over the coming 3 months.
ChangeXchange