Our Approach

Understanding how to collect
Drawing on the knowledge
Actively involving senior leaders
Working with families
Being multi-agency
Improving understanding
Intervening early
We don’t claim to have all the answers, but our wide-ranging knowledge and experience have given us clear insights into the essential ingredients of work with children and families that seeks to achieve real and lasting change in organisations and to make a tangible difference to children’s lives and life chances.

Our approach and analytical framework is straightforward and easy to articulate. We believe that policies, plans and strategies need to be equally simple, easy to articulate and comprehensible to all.
Our approach is grounded in the importance of:

  • working with families, to build on their strengths
  • intervening early, as soon as families or professionals identify difficulties
  • being multi-agency, pooling resources and using staff skills and time creatively
  • understanding how to collect and analyse relevant data and use it to inform and evaluate service development
  • improving understanding of outcomes – how to describe and measure them, and how outcomes for individuals link with outcomes for services and for populations
  • drawing on the knowledge and expertise of local families, practitioners and service providers
  • actively involving senior leaders to champion change that is about culture not process, and
  • testing innovative approaches, learning from failure, building on success.