Thinking big? Think carefully

Recent findings from the National Study of Delinquency Prevention in Schools show that those wishing to use prevention programs that seek to shape the school environment must be properly prepared.

Although it may be possible to implement individual-focused interventions, like counseling, successfully with limited support, wide scale initiatives are doomed to failure without the right conditions, especially support from the head teacher, writes Allison Payne in the journal Prevention Science.

Developers of school-based prevention programs now speak in unison about the need for quality implementation in order to secure success. Without putting a program into place as designed, the desired outcomes will not be achieved.

Fortunately, research has also been able to pinpoint how schools can best prepare for successful implementation. A substantial body of work highlights five main recommendations.

Programs must select programs and train their staff locally. Standardized interventions should be used. Schools need a certain level of organizational capacity and must be able to integrate the program into usual routines. The support of the head teacher is also a key factor.

Most studies up until now have looked at programs en masse, without appreciating the huge differences between them. Different styles of program may rely on different resources and processes.

When looking at off-the-peg school-based prevention interventions, there is a clear divide between those which intervene at the individual level, like therapy or counseling, and those that try to shape the school environment. These include initiatives like social and emotional learning curricula.

Allison Payne from Villanova University looked at data from over 500 schools, examining how closely these supports were linked with implementation quality, comparing individual-level and environmentally directed interventions.

The results showed there were far more sticking points when implementing prevention programs that try to alter the school environment. Individual-focused interventions are not completely self-reliant but quality implementation is influenced far less by wider factors. The input of a team of dedicated program coordinators could be enough for them to work.

For interventions targeting the school environment, all the implementation supports contributed to quality implementation. The relationships between them were far stronger and more complex than for individual-focused interventions.

The real make-or-break factor for environmental interventions was the support of the head teacher, without which success was unlikely. School-wide programs rely on “the majority of the school community rather than just by a few key personnel”, says Payne, and the support of head teachers is essential to move this forward.

Knowing that the success of prevention programs hinges on decent implementation, schools must select programs they are capable of putting into place as they were designed. School-wide prevention requires all-round support to flourish, whilst individual-focused interventions are more self-sufficient. Schools should be honest with themselves, and set up for success.

See: Payne AA (2009), ‘Do Predictors of the Implementation Quality of School-Based Prevention Programs Differ by Program Type?’, Prevention Science, 10, p.151-167