Technique Is Not Enough (TINE) - British Psychological Society

announcements, radio spots, newspaper columns and community newsletter tips on commonparenting issues and topics of general interest to parents. Brochures, posters and flyers are alsoavailable for trained Triple P practitioners.FASTOne site I worked with had members of the fire service there to build links as they had an issue withquite young children involved in arson. Because of the cultural representation which is at the heartof FAST every FAST is different. The FAST song has been translated into Somalian at one site, foodis often very varied and the games played during children’s time vary. FAST activities have beentranslated into many languages. The monthly FASTworks segment of FAST where parents selfmanagetheir own parents group fosters all kinds of positive relationships in the school and the widercommunity. At one site I was involved with the parents group organised their children to do asponsored bag packing at the local supermarket to pay for a day trip in the summer. The activity waspositive on many levels. People saw the school uniform and connected it with positive activity, theparents and children felt empowered that they could come together and achieve a positive result.Resilient Families AustraliaOur programme encourages parents to develop a ‘sense of community’ and attempts to increaseopportunities for parents to interact within the school. The programme assumes that not all parentswill wish to directly participate and hence information exchange within informal social networks isencouraged. The programme intentionally links schools and parenting programmes to enhance theschool environment generally.Programmes can also show evidence of attending to the related issues of community resilienceand the sustainability of local sources of parenting expertise and community empowerment:Programmes should therefore keep records of participating families’ social contexts and ofdifferential drop-out rates across social and cultural groups. For example:FASTFAST also uses multiple strategies requiring co-production between staff and local low-incomeparents in the planning, training, recruitment, adaptation, implementation and evaluation of localprogrammes in order to maximise the engagement and retention of low-income and sociallymarginalised parents in attending their eight weekly, evening sessions of multi-family groups.Explicit sharing of power with parents by professionals and the recognition that there are many typesof knowledge is a core value of FAST. A FAST programme development office monitors 40 per cent ofthe programme’s content and structure as core components not subject to change, and encourageslocal teams to adapt the remaining 60 per cent of the multi-family group processes. This ensures thatthe adaptations are on a deep level and unique to each new site. The goal is to empower the coproductionimplementation team to make their FAST programme an ideal cultural fit with theirlocal circumstances.FAST is consistently successful at engaging and retaining families. In the UK, for example, the first20 schools implementing the FAST programme have recorded average drop-out rates of only 14 percent and this was in a programme population where 70 per cent of families of four people were livingon annual incomes of less than £10,000.Technique Is Not Enough 53