• By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Wednesday 28th April, 2010

Read Mark Lipsey – "We need more than ‘brand’ aid"

Governments and local authorities are increasingly likely to stipulate that their services for children should be “evidence-based”; but what passes for “evidence-based” varies enormously from flagrant misuse of the term to a bold affirmation of good science. [See the Prevention Action special edition about Standards of Evidence.]Rising evidential standards have bestowed high status on so…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Tuesday 27th April, 2010

Will a David Olds baby be first to make the big leap

Much as prevention scientists, service commissioners, economists and – lately – politicians may harp on about their value, no evidence-based program in the US or the UK has yet become part of standard practice.There have been trials and more trials, and sizable local investment in the most promising few, but none can yet claim to have successfully "gone to scale".Among the closest to qualifyin…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Monday 26th April, 2010

Building better performance with Dan and Clay

Children's services around the world cannot escape the unprecedented cuts in public sector services. But fewer jobs and dwindling resources will inevitably mean that children's needs increase and youth violence becomes more problematic. That, in turn, will aggravate the pressure on systems and services.How can such a vicious cycle be broken?One possibility lies in an approach developed in Florida…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Sunday 25th April, 2010

Family life? – Norwegian bear says it’s a picnic

How well we are able to design universal parenting programs – ones that work as beneficially in Belgrade as in Buenos Aries – is a fair measure of how much we know about our common humanity.For the science to be good it must be good anywhere, even taking into account culture, climate and religion. [See for example: Are the qualities of good parenting good the world over?]But our understanding…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Thursday 15th April, 2010

Fires, swamps, mosquitoes – too late for metaphors?

Its likely fate is that it will be lost in the surf of General Election politics, but the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families succeeded in putting its version of the argument for early intervention into print just before the campaigning began.It stirred mixed feelings in Nottingham North MP Graham Allen, who with former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith has been championing…

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  • By Sarah Blower
  • Posted on Monday 12th April, 2010

It won't happen unless we make it happen

The challenges of program implementation were the focus of much attention and concern at the 2010 Blueprints for Violence Prevention Conference in San Antonio. An opening plenary celebrated the huge success of Blueprints in bringing to national and international recognition the value of interventions that have proven impact on children’s health and development. But, even for the most successful,…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Friday 09th April, 2010

Seven giants for 700 preventionists

In Texas we are told that everything is bigger. True to form, at the opening session of the 2010 Blueprints for Violence Prevention conference in San Antonio, moderator Clay Yeager paraded a “company of giants”. His panel line-up included seven of the world’s leading prevention scientists alongside Shay Bilchik, who was a policy maker at the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevent…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Thursday 08th April, 2010

Building from Blueprints in San Antonio

It has been two years since the Blueprints for Violence Prevention hosted its last meeting in Denver. This year Prevention Action travels to San Antonio, Texas, to catch up with the latest developments. Over 700 delegates from ten countries include policy makers, practitioners and prevention scientists, who together are creating a unique and challenging context for the exchange of ideas, experienc…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Tuesday 06th April, 2010

How will they know if their children are in the zone?

Just before Christmas, the US House of Representatives passed legislation to make funding available for up to 20 experiments in local community action to combat poverty, crime and poor student attainment.The $10m initiative centers on Promise Neighborhoods, which will qualify for that description by their determination to engage children and parents in a multi-faceted “pipeline” strategy to me…

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  • By Dartington SRU
  • Posted on Thursday 01st April, 2010

Will prevention science get cruise control?

Conventional wisdom about the Wright brothers’ aeronautical achievement credits them with the successful development of an early form of dynamic cruise control.It was not the problem of getting a plane into the air that they so famously overcame; their gift to science was keeping it there, by adroitly compensating for the vagaries of the surrounding atmospheric forces.Prevention scientists grapp…

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