Technique Is Not Enough (TINE) - British Psychological Society

7. Principle 4. Sustainability: Creating long-lastingownership and commitment7.1. Why sustainability is importantIn the previous two chapters we tried to demonstrate how co-production methods andclose attention to the development of social capital can enhance programme effectivenessand contribute to the sustainability of local positive parenting practice. This creates thekind of social context referred to in recent legislation that requires commissioners to takeaccount of the social value that such programmes can deliver through carefully consideredlocal implementation plans. We believe socially inclusive practice has ‘outcome value’ aswell as the more traditional view of its ‘process value’.We now focus on how parenting programmes themselves can be sustained by theirintegration into ‘services as usual’. This is important for social inclusion because it increasesthe likelihood that families who could benefit will be able to gain access both now and inthe future rather than another good idea turning into just another ‘flash in the pan’.Many people are seeking new ways to improve children’s lives – to reduce violence, toprevent maltreatment, to improve school performance, and so on. Parenting programmesare amongst the interventions shown by the highest standard of evidence to enhancechildren’s health and development. In the UK the top five includes the most well-known,Incredible Years and Triple P and three others, as ranked by the National Academy ofParenting Practitioners for the Parenting Early Intervention Pathfinders (PEIPS) initiative;Family Strengthening Programme/Family Strengthening (10-14), Family Community, andFAST. These five appear on a recommended list of evidence-based parenting programmesfor local authorities to choose from when commissioning local services. Local educationauthorities have received state funding for training local parenting practitioners in one ofthese five approaches.This is exciting and welcome but there are also some salutary lessons to be learned fromexisting attempts to scale-up the implementation of such programmes.Only a few sites in the world are near delivering parenting programmes sustainably. Thismight be described as integrating an innovation into ongoing operations, orinstitutionalising the programme or, more simply, getting a model programme embeddedin ‘services as usual’. Put another way, although parenting programmes are often designedto be delivered through youth justice, social services, education or mental health systems, itis rare that they have succeeded in becoming a core part of such systems, despite the factthat, as we have demonstrated in the previous section, some deliver benefits far beyondtheir obvious purpose and cost.In the US some state-wide scaling-up initiatives have taken place to implement parentingprogrammes. For example in Florida, the work of Evidence-based Associates has led toMulti-systemic Therapy (MST) and Functional Family Therapy (FFT) becoming ‘services asusual’ state-wide. Washington State is institutionalising MST, FFT, and AggressionReplacement Training as part of the juvenile justice system, again state-wide. IncredibleYears has been developing throughout Wales over many years and they have recently56 Professional Practice Board