Successful prevention programs require able community co-ordinators. But what skills do these individuals need and can social work education train a new generation of prevention practitioners?

Professionals and researchers have great choice when it comes to choosing instruments to measure children’s health and development. But that is the problem and now a project in the US has distilled their essence to create a reliable and less problematic situation.

Newsweek has listed Finland as the best of 100 countries in the world due to its top ranked education system. What accounts for its pupils and schools leading all others?

In the final part of our look at Jim Alexander and Functional Family Therapy, Prevention Action considers how his personal attributes have made FFT a success. Michael Little from the Social Research Unit at Dartington Reports.

Functional Family Therapy (FFT) began, facing all kinds of problems, not least scepticism and the virtual non-existence of evidence-based work, but persistence – and some luck – paid off and it now works with 30,000 families a year in seven countries, as our third article on Jim Alexander’s work shows.

Jim Alexander‘s all too common behaviour at university taught him some lessons that have influenced his work with families, as we learn in the second part of Prevention Action’s profile.

Jim Alexander’s pioneering work on family functioning derives from his own unsettled childhood and experience of being parented, as the first part of our profile shows.

Over 100,000 American families have benefited from the Nurse Family Partnership program. Its success is rooted in the cautious, deliberate and determined approach of creator David Olds.

David Finkelhor is rare among champions opposing child maltreatment and family violence to have done so much to advocate for the use of science and evidence to improve policy and practice in this area.

Its one thing to design an intervention that shows demonstrable improvements on child outcomes, its quite another to get these embedded within systems and implemented at wide-scale with fidelity. Prevention Action brings together some of the elite few who have managed to achieve this and asks: what is the key to scaling up without dumbing down? The answer, it appears, may be a healthy dose of humility.

The Juvenile Alternative Prevention Initiative has been developed over two decades but how is it applied to policy and practice and where does it fit in with prevention science?

This week, Prevention Action has been focusing on the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative. In this third feature, its founder and director, Bart Lubow, explains how the innovative service grew into a program now running in nearly half of American states, and details the lessons others can learn from its example.

Many juvenile justice reformers focus on changing the behaviour of young people. The Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative focuses instead on changing the behaviour of adults, Bart Lubow, its founder and director, tells Prevention Action in the second part of our series.

Locking up young offenders costs money and increases crime, but how to break the cycle? This week, Prevention Action examines the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, a program already running in half of US states, which aims to do just that.

To Mark Greenberg, Director of the Prevention Research Centre at Penn State University, “the most exciting thing about science is collaboration”. This is a hallmark of his career that has pushed the boundaries of prevention science, and is the subject of his address at the Annual Greenwood Lecture at the Peninsula Medical School in the South-west of England.