Saturday, 15 January 2005 - 2:00 PM

This presentation is part of: School-Based Interventions

Integrating Empirical Practice Procedures: Evaluating A Home-School Support and Liaison Service

Integrating Empirical Practice Procedures: Evaluating A Home-School Support and Liaison Service

PURPOSE: This paper reports on the evaluation of a Home School Support and Liaison Service, a government-funded Lancashire Children’s Fund project in Fleetwood, England. The project works with four schools to strengthen links between the schools and families. The main objective of the project is to attempt to overcome any barriers that children and young people may face at their time at school. The project works with children on a one-to-one basis and also through group work and/or family therapy addressing issues such as anger management, self-esteem, emotional problems and poor school attendance.

METHOD: The method included the integration of single-subject designs into the project team’s practice to systematically track outcomes using standardised measures, and the use of comparison group designs. Procedures were also developed and integrated to enable the systematic tracking of factors in the circumstances of service users that may influence the outcomes, as well as the content of the interventions, using a SPSS database. Binary logistic regression models were tested to investigate what interventions worked and in what circumstances.

RESULTS: This evaluation is based on the project’s work with 44 children where an outcome measure was used repeatedly. The project workers selected Behaviour Rating Index for Children (BRIC) to be used as a self-report measure with children, measuring the children’s behaviour problems. 38 (86%) improved on the BRIC score; and of these 19 had a mean change of –12 or better. When the database was divided into those that improved higher or lower than the mean, the Spearman test indicated that significant factors included gender, known to social services, and history of child protection issues. When binary logistic regression method was used, it was found that the most important factor was the baseline scores, and that those with the worst scores were more likely to improve above the mean.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: These findings suggest that, on the whole, the project is largely effective in improving behaviour, and that it is more likely to be effective where the baseline scores tend to be poor. The use of single-subject designs in all cases enabled the project workers to evaluate their practice systematically and to target their interventions where they were most effective.

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