We know having a supportive home helps to keep children safe from involvement in violence. Where children live in homes where there’s conflict or domestic abuse, alcohol or substance misuse or where other family members are involved in crime, they’re at higher risk. Through a funding round in 2021 the Youth Endowment Fund were seeking to answer one question:

Which approaches are most effective in helping families and carers to create a supportive home environment for 6- to 14-year-old children (including looked-after children), reducing the likelihood of them becoming involved in violence?

The YEF is an organisation committed to finding evidence of what works to prevent children and young people becoming involved in violence. In 2021 the YEF released funding to support research projects designed to understand the most effective routes to help families to create supportive home environments and reduce the likelihood of them becoming involved in violence.

Triple P UK and Ireland (TPUK) successfully applied for funding to deliver Standard Teen Triple P (STTP) as a suitable parenting intervention, with the aim of helping parents develop a caring and responsive relationship with their child, develop awareness of their child’s behaviour and respond in a positive, consistent, and non-violent way, and to support their child to develop social and emotional skills.

STTP is delivered on a one-to-one basis for parents of teenagers up to 16 years, supporting parents who have concerns about their teen’s behaviour or development across various settings. Over 10 sessions, parents identify the influences on teenagers’ behaviour and set their own goals for change. Parents also learn ways to use appropriate consequences for problem behaviour (e.g. breaking family rules, taking inappropriate risks, emotional outbursts).

The project

Partnering with 6 Local Authorities - Birmingham Children’s Trust, Cambridgeshire County Council, Gloucestershire County Council, London Borough of Merton, Peterborough City Council and Wirral Council - TPUK delivered training to 117 practitioners across these sites and provided regular project and implementation support.

The project was set up to be delivered in five phases, including:

1. Start-up (funding acceptance, appointment of evaluator)
2. Set-up/Implementation (establishment of Local Authority Service Level Agreements, practitioner training, implementation support)
3. Pilot Delivery (small-scall trial focused on testing trial feasibility. Outcomes from this phase determined project feasibility on a larger scale, with a planned stop/go decision to follow pilot before proceeding to next phase)
4. Efficacy (complete definitive trial)
5. Evaluation

During the set-up phase it became evident that social workers referring and delivering on the project was not practical, largely due to the challenges associated with their demanding and intricate workloads. The impracticality of consistently committing to fixed times over a ten-week period for programme delivery was noted as a constraint by sites, given the unpredictable nature of the social workers primary responsibilities, which often centred around crisis response. As a result, a decision was reached to exclude social workers from participating in the training and delivery. Instead, the focus shifted towards engaging with internal edge-of-care teams identified by sites who were better able to accommodate the scheduling requirements of the STTP programme.

The project achieved high levels of engagement with 84 managers attending briefing workshops in January and February 2023. Attendance and accreditation rates at training were also high, with 96% of selected practitioners completing training and gaining accreditation to deliver STTP. Practitioners reported high overall satisfaction, with 80% indicating that the training met their expectations and practitioners also reporting significant improvements in proficiency of parent consultation skills post Triple P training and accreditation.

Following the set-up and implementation phase, where training and accreditation was completed, participating local authorities were then responsible for delivering support to families across their region. Existing edge-of-care and early help teams were responsible for identification of parents and carers.

Parents and caregivers who met the project’s criteria were assessed for eligibility by sites and the evaluation team. This involved not only interacting with families and reducing stigma around the services provided but also gathering crucial details to improve communication and avoid repetitive sharing of their situations. Once eligibility was confirmed, and consent provided, parents were assigned randomly to either the intervention or control group for the trial conducted by the team at The University Warwick, Centre for Research in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (CIDD) (formally the Centre for Educational Development Appraisal and Research (CEDAR)).

While the challenges with social workers’ capacity was addressed early on, Local Authorities still faced challenges with recruiting sufficient families willing to consent to be part of a randomised controlled trial (RCT). Despite the implementation of a number of mitigation strategies by each Local Authority, it was felt that these challenges still presented a risk to recruitment and ensuring an appropriately powered trial. As a result of this, and the moving priorities of the funder, the decision was made not to proceed beyond the Pilot Phase by the YEF.

Despite this, there was significant learning and Local Authority partners had the following to say about the project:

• “I feel that the project team at Triple P have been invaluable throughout this process and could not have been more supportive or helpful.”
• “TPUK staff have been fantastic, encouraging, supportive and helpful.”
• “Having weekly meetings to discuss the tasks that needed completing and being able to raise any issues in a timely manner [was most helpful].”

Key Learnings and Recommendations

There are many promising findings related to the delivery of this project, including additional professional training for practitioners across multiple local authorities and high satisfaction with training.

Local authorities showed a commitment to the project’s success, with consistent attendance at implementation meetings fostering a collaborative environment where tools and strategies were shared. Structured peer support also maintained motivation and momentum of practitioners. A large majority of participating sites also expressed a desire to continue to deliver Standard Teen Triple P across their Services, and have expressed high satisfaction with TPUK communication, management and overall project delivery.

This project has highlighted many of the challenges of implementing supports for vulnerable families at the edge of care. Particularly, there are challenges in identifying and recruiting families into a project that involves the possibility of randomisation to a control group, especially when families are experiencing high levels of crisis, as is often the case.

TPUK have experienced a responsive and supportive relationship with YEF throughout the course of the project and we are grateful for the opportunity to provide support to vulnerable families and look forward to building on the learnings from this trial as we continue to work towards solutions so that every child can benefit from responsive, positive parenting.

We would also like to thank participating Local Authorities, and the families involved in the research for their dedication and commitment to the project.

The University of Warwick, Centre for Research in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (CIDD) continues to deliver a number of elements of quantitative and process evaluation related to the trial, which we expected them to report on in early 2025.

You can read the full report here.