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Prevention and Early Intervention Programme Presentation to the Trinity College Summer School, August 2012. Presentation Overview:. What is the Prevention and Early Intervention Programme (PEIP)? Why was PEIP needed? What does the PEIP do? What have we learned?.
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Prevention and Early Intervention ProgrammePresentation to the Trinity College Summer School, August 2012.
Presentation Overview: • What is the Prevention and Early Intervention Programme (PEIP)? • Why was PEIP needed? • What does the PEIP do? • What have we learned?
What is Prevention and Early Intervention? • Strategies aimed at realising the full potential of children, families and communities; • Building skills and capacities to prevent the occurrence of problems, or prevention of a problem getting worse; • Intervening at a young age or early on in the development of a difficulty.
Why Prevention and Early Intervention? • Despite investment, historically poor outcomes in areas of disadvantage; • Minimal resources targeted at beginning of life cycle; • Focus on crisis response at expense of promotion, prevention and early intervention; • Absence of evidence-informed, integrated service design; • Lack of community and parental engagement and trust in services.
Integrated prevention and early intervention • Costly and intractable educational, health and mental health problems occur because children families don’t have appropriate and/or sufficient services, early enough • Prevention and early intervention can improve outcomes for children at risk of poverty • Integrated Prevention and Early Intervention promotes • secure attachment • age-appropriate social and emotional development and pro social behaviour • positive protective relationships • language and literacy skills • mental health. • Prevention and Early Intervention has a critical role to play in preventing tragic and costly consequences for children and families
Prevention and Early Intervention Programme • 3 area-based prevention and early intervention sites • Ballymun: youngballymun • Dublin 17: Preparing for Life • Tallaght West: Childhood Development Initiative (CDI) Identified due to: • Leadership in the communities; • Willingness to engage in new approaches; • High levels of disadvantage on a range of indicators; • High child populations.
Common Statistics (2005): • Unemployment • House hold headed by lone parent • Educational attainment • Mental health needs • Behaviour • 14.5% (three times the national average) • 50% • Twice national average of early school leaving • 30% + adults receiving treatment for depression • 25% 4 year olds displayed behavioural difficulty.
Common Features: • Jointly funded by Atlantic Philanthropies and Department of Children and Youth Affairs – total investment of €36m over 5 years; • Driving evidence-based, outcomes-focused prevention and early intervention approaches in children’s services; • Innovative delivery; • Rigorous evaluation.
Programme Themes • A life cycle approach • Starts pre birth, continues through infancy, early childhood, school years and community wide • Focus on 0-6 years period, particularly essential 0-3 foundation stage • Evidence of what works • Needs-led strategies, drawing on evidence-based approaches • Integrated services model • Fostering widespread engagement, collective identification of issues, development of responses and ownership of strategy • Collective realignment of capacity to deliver evidence-based services • A focus on implementation • Rigorous attention to practice detail, regular review of delivery, culture of continuous improvement
Practice themes • Activate health and community services to build and mobilise parental resources from pregnancy, infancy and throughout children’s lives • Develop high quality early years care and education services • Engage with schools to implement balanced literacy frameworks and social and emotional development initiatives • Work with community providers to amplify capacity in youth mental health, restorative practice and community safety
Overarching messages for improving children’s lives 1: Mandate integrated prevention and early intervention in service provision for children and families 2: Drive the implementation of area-based approaches to tackle child poverty 3: Build requirements for evidence-based practice into funding conditions
What have we learned about evidence-based practice? • It is a new approach to children’s services • It values evidence and mandates accountability • Requires a strong information base • Investing in evidence-based approaches has the greatest chance of being effective • Services must be developed in response to identified need • Initiatives aimed at improving outcomes for children need to be strongly based on evidence, rigorously implemented and evaluated.
Thank You For further information visit our websites: www.youngballymun.org www.preparingforlife.ie www.twcdi.ie The Prevention and Early Intervention Programme is jointly funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies and The Department of Children and Youth Affairs