What works for troubled children & young people?

Click here to go to the pages.

What these pages offer

The pages suggest evidence-based strategies/interventions that a worker can use to tackle specific problems that troubled children and young people may have, and evidence-based projects that might be set up to help children, young people and their families with a particular difficulty. (In total, there are almost 1000 inter-linked pages.)

How to use the pages

The content of the pages is structured using the categories of the Health of the Nation Outcome Scales for Child and Adolescents (HoNOSCA), so you first need to select one of the following problem areas from the index page:

• Disruptive, antisocial or aggressive behaviour
• Emotional and related symptoms
• Family life and relationship problems
• Nonorganic somatic symptoms
• Overactivity, attention, or concentration problems
• Peer relationship problems
• Physical illness or disability problems
• Poor school attendance
• Scholastic or language skills problems
• Self-care and independence problems
• Self-harm/Nonaccidental self-injury
• Substance misuse

You will then be asked to select the age group about which you want information.
There are some variations between sections but you will generally be offered a menu of:

• Overview
• An ecological approach – seeing the problem in its context
• Associated problems – other issues that may equally or more need to be the focus of concern
• Immediate steps – what you might want to do straightaway
• The tool box – evidence-based activities that you could use
• Validated programmes – which you might want to access or set up
• Contact information – organisations which might be able to help parents or professionals.

You can jump to whichever of these is most relevant to your immediate interests.
References can be accessed via the link in the footer on each page.

Navigating

Each of the pages has links to other pages. The document trail at the top allows you to keep tabs on what pages you have viewed and to retrace your steps if you want. The ‘What Works’ search facility can be used to find all the ‘What Works’ pages that refer to a particular topic.

Where the pages have come from

This database started life as a written publication, What Works for Troubled Children?, jointly commissioned by Wiltshire Social Services (as it was then known) and Barnardo’s. In its current form, it was commissioned by Wiltshire and developed with social workers from Wiltshire, under the guidance of Peter Fanshawe, and working with Ann Buchanan and her team of social work researchers at the Centre for Research for Parenting and Children at University of Oxford. In 2007 a partnership was formed between these two organisations and research in practice in order to bring this unique information and learning source to a wider group of children’s services agencies and professional disciplines.

Keeping the pages up to date

Every section will be updated annually through a peer-review and practitioner-check process.

Link directly to your local services and resources

These pages can be made even more useful to the staff of Partner agencies by including links to the relevant local services and resources available to them. If your agency wants to set up this link please contact us here. The accuracy of the content of these links is the responsibility of the agency supplying them.

Fundamental assumptions

The information in these pages is based on the following assumptions:

• these pages are intended as an aid to professional practice
• the pages are not intended to be used to assess risk. It is assumed that workers using the pages will, through their professional training, be competent to know which children are likely to be at risk of significant harm
• interventions suggested are based on ‘best’ evidence available to the authors at the point of writing. Where possible this relates to interventions that have been comprehensively tested in trials, but where research evidence is limited or not available a lesser standard of 'current best practice' is used
• the use of different interventions will depend on the worker's training and role - for example, direct work with families in the home would not normally be undertaken by teachers.