So, following earlier speculation about getting to the essence of the "offer" of evidenced based programs, I gave my tweeting skills a try on Functional Family Therapy. I got to:

FFT improves relationships in highly dysfunctional families so that adolescents get along better at home and behave better in society.

That's 136 characters. Four to spare. Ideally I would fit in the words "is proven" – to indicate a distinctive part of the program.

Then I got up courage and said all kinds of harsh things to Jim Alexander, such as his slides are very complicated and it's hard for business and systems people and politicians to decipher all this information and what does he think about my tweet distilling it to 136 characters.

And he was very polite. “I couldn’t have put it better myself," he said. But then he put another side of the argument.

“You have to bear in mind that in the past the world in which we operate has included many people who are charlatans. They told you boldly and simply what they did and how they transformed people’s lives – and it wasn’t true. And that left a distaste in the minds of many people responsible for children’s lives. And we're anxious not to fall into that trap.”