Editorial: To innovate, or not to innovate?
| Pages | 2-3 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/17466660200600027 |
| Published date | 01 December 2006 |
| Date | 01 December 2006 |
| Author | Michael Little,Nick Axford |
| Subject Matter | Education,Health & social care,Sociology |
2
1Dartington Social
Research Unit, UK,
and Chapin Hall
Center for Children,
University of
Chicago, US
2Dartington Social
Research Unit, UK
Journal of Children’s Services
Volume 1 Issue 4 December 2006
©Pavilion Journals (Brighton) Ltd
There has been a surge in innovation in children’s
services in the last decade, particularly in the UK
where there has been significant financial investment
by government. Much of what has been introduced
represents a good mix of central and local government
contributions. For example, Sure Start, the major early
years’ prevention programme, involves a broad model,
largely funded in the development phase by central
government but permitting much local variation to
reflect the needs of the communities in which it is
implemented. Similarly, the Children's Fund –
sponsored by central government to address the risk
of social exclusion among children aged 8–13 years –
encourages innovation and integration in all 150
English local authorities; it was akin to letting 1,000
flowers bloom, since new services emerged from
discussions about evidence collected locally.
In another sense therecan be tensions between
central and local interests. These arenot simply a
matter of reconciling the interests of central and local
government; the tensions are mirrored in the
relationships between the centre of a local authority
and its outlying regions or between major purchasing
agencies and providers. Something of this dynamic is
captured in the interview in this edition of the Journal
with Tim Byles, until recently responsible for driving
through reforms to children’s services in a large
English local authority.
The tensions have at least four sources. First is the
power relationship. There will always be unease about
implementing a programme that is conceived in another
place or that has significant conditions attached to
funding. Second is the necessity of accountability.
When central government or the centre of local
government decides to invest heavily in a new service,
there is a requirement for expenditure to be broadly in
line with the intentions of legislators or policy-makers.
Third is the variability of local needs. Each child is
unique and each community has distinctive features.
Local epidemiological research seeks to capture
these patterns in order to inform service provision.
The article in this issue by Jessica Asscher and her
colleagues describes one such study in the
Netherlands, focusing on families with young
children. Against this there are many common
features to children’s development and patterns of
impairment, and many risks to well-being exist to
some degree in all communities. To what extent can a
service conceived of centrally be implemented
without adaptation in a local community? Or how
appropriate for communities in, say, Scotland are
services designed, implemented and proven to work
in the US; or even how relevant for Cardiff is a model
proven to work in rural Wales?
Fourth is the question of programme fidelity.
Service designers are painstaking when developing
an intervention, for example bypreparing a logic
model that specifies howit will achievedesired
outcomes, being clear about the fit between service
components and risks to a child’sdevelopment and
identifying which children may be expected to benefit
most from the service. The kind of well-defined
services that emerge can be seen in Nick Gould and
Joanna Richardson’s meta-analysis of parent training/
education programmes relating to the management of
children with conduct disorders. But when local
adaptation results in a fundamental change to the
logic model or widening the group of children served
by the programme, the prospects of replicating
improvements in child outcomes are compromised.
In the interplay between central and local forces it
is sometimes difficult to know exactly what is being
implemented. Many parenting programmes
supported by experimental evaluations are adapted
so frequently that their integrity is all but lost. They
become something else. When encountering a
programme like Incredible Years or Triple-P, then, the
first question to ask is ‘Does it do what it says on the
tin?’ If we cannot be clear about the nature of the
innovation, it is impossible to know whether it works
in reducing impairments to children’s development
and, more importantly, why.
Editorial
To innovate, or not to innovate?
Michael Little1and Nick Axford2
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