Young People in Focus

SECTION 1

1.1 Project Structure

The overall aim of the IYPP Project was to develop and test effective practice models of involving young people in parenting interventions, which strengthen parenting protective factors and reduce the parenting risk factors related to the offending/anti social behaviour/truancy of young people.

The objectives of the IYPP Project were:

• To develop practice models of involving young people in parenting interventions.
• To extend parenting interventions by using five models of involving young people.
• To evaluate and compare the effectiveness of the different models (with each other and with parent focused interventions) and their impacts on:
  • young person’s offending/anti-social behaviour/truancy
  • parent(s)/parenting
  • parent-young person relationship
• To recommend a strategy for the replication of effective practice.
• To disseminate the findings from the research project.

A range of statutory and voluntary parenting interventions have been developed in response to the provisions of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, which enabled courts to make Parenting Orders to prevent youth offending, anti social behaviour and non-school attendance from June 2000 in England and Wales. More recent legislation² has expanded the range of circumstances in which parenting orders can be made and added parenting contracts to the range of available statutory measures. 

The services that have been developed in this field have mainly focused on support to parents independently of interventions with their children. However, research in the US has shown that work with both parents and children can be more effective than concentrating on just one or the other (Mitchell et al 1993, Alexander et al 1994 and Kumpfer and Alvarado 1995 & 1998). Given these findings, a challenge faced by parenting providers in the UK was to develop their core work with parents to involve young people. The IYPP Project was consequently designed as a small scale study to learn from the direct experience of implementing a range of models of intervention involving both parents and young people. 

The UK Treasury under the Invest to Save Budget funded the Youth Justice Board (YJB) in partnership with Trust for the Study of Adolescence (TSA) to develop practice models for involving young people in parenting interventions. The YJB also contributed funding to the project, which ran from 2002 to 2004.

TSA provided the day-to-day management of the IYPP project and contracted with service deliverers, Centre for Fun and Families, West Berkshire Family Group Conferences Project, Luton Youth Offending Team, East Berkshire Youth Offending Teams and Kinara Family Resource Centre, to develop and test five models of involving young people in the following interventions:

• Parallel Groups
• Family Group Conferencing
• Family Therapy
• Individual Parents and Individual Young People in Parallel Programmes
• Family Skills Training for Parents and Children – Strengthening Families

TSA also contracted with the Policy Research Bureau (PRB), an independent research centre, to coordinate and manage the evaluation element of the IYPP project and to evaluate its success in achieving the objectives outlined above. This included gathering information about the experiences of the young people and parents involved in the project as a whole and on the process of implementing the projects. The data collection methods were:

• ‘Before’ questionnaires completed by parents and young people as they are introduced to a project.
• ‘After’ questionnaires collected on or near completion of their involvement.
• Questionnaires completed retrospectively by project workers about their perceptions of the experiences of young people and parents involved in the project (whether or not they had ‘completed’ the project)
• Interviews held with eight young people, ten parents and five project workers (one per site).

The findings from the evaluation are presented later in this section in relation to process (drawn from the individual interviews with five project site staff, one per project site) and in Section 3 in relation to young people and parents’ experiences of the programme. 

TSA organised multi-site meetings to bring staff from each of the five sites together on a regular basis. These provided the opportunity to share experiences of working within the overall IYPP project, to share practice issues and strategies to address them and take part in training on key issues identified across the five sites.

That was wonderful to meet with the other projects to see what they were doing. We learnt an enormous amount just through sort of informal networking at those days.

(Sunita) PRB Interview with site staff

The TSA project co-ordinator also met regularly with the five project sites individually, working with them to develop and regularly review project plans and risk strategies. It seems that some sites found this approach helpful and intended to adopt the planning and risk strategy model for other areas of their work. Whereas, for at least one worker this approach

sometimes felt very formal, with the feeling that they were being ‘checked up on’ in terms of meeting targets.  

(PRB Interview with site staff)

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