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Both the government and local service providers in the UK are becoming increasingly aware of the possibility of improving child outcomes through the delivery of parenting programmes. Government initiatives, such as Sure Start, Pathfinders and Flying Start are a positive step forward, yet programmes sometimes fail to work in service settings. This article describes the components necessary to deliver effective interventions, exploring the need to choose an evidence‐based parent programme, implement it with fidelity and evaluate the outcome. It describes the steps taken in North and Mid Wales to do this and reports briefly on the successful outcomes achieved by delivering the Incredible Years Basic Parenting Programme to the parents of high‐risk children in Sure Start areas.

This paper describes the author's work during 35 years as a clinical psychologist in the NHS in Wales working mainly with conduct disordered children and their families. It describe how from initially working within an applied behaviour analysis (ABA) framework with individual families she subsequently established and researched the group based Incredible Years (IY) parent programme in Wales and led a Wales‐wide dissemination of the IY programmes.

The paper provides a case study example of the use of the Society for Prevention Research (SPR) criteria for translational research, that is research that can be applied successfully in the real world.

Many of the challenges were overcome through the inclusion of strategies to maximise effectiveness with differing populations, and by gaining the support of government and local services.

The paper discusses the challenges of taking an evidence‐based programme to scale.

This article reports on the first health technology appraisal conducted jointly between the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE). The appraisal systematically reviewed evidence for the clinical effectiveness of parent‐training/education programmes in the management of children with conduct disorders. This appraisal is highly topical in the light of cross‐cutting policy agendas concerned with increasing parenting capacity. It is also methodologically innovative in its approach to synthesising the meta‐analysis of trial evidence on outcomes of programmes with qualitative evidence on process and implementation. The appraisal found parent‐training/education programmes to be effective in the management of children with conduct disorders, and it identifies the generic characteristics of effective programmes. It is concluded that this approach offers an exemplar for the development of systematic reviewing of complex psychosocial interventions that are relevant to integrated children's services.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the utility of an evidence-based suite of programmes, The Incredible Years (IY), to enhance outcomes for children using a parent-teacher partnership model.

A review of the broad evidence base for the IY parent, teacher and child programmes, uniquely focusing on the inter-relationships between home and school contexts.

Evidence suggests that it is beneficial to parents, teachers and children to deliver IY programmes applying a multi-modal approach.

This paper, read in conjunction with other contributions in this volume, demonstrates the growing viability of partnership strategies that support children, their families and teachers to enhance school readiness, and promote positive child outcomes.

This chapter explores the impact of delivering culturally community family therapy with strength-based strategies, to transgenerational Black Haitian families living in Haiti and the Dominican Republic following the 2010 earthquake. A series of workshop intervention over several years, which were co-facilitated by community pastors and leaders provided a cultural-based intervention drawing on Black British and Caribbean culture, Haitian culture, Christian spiritual belief systems, in conjunction with some bi-cultural attachment and systemic methods and techniques. Community feedback through testimonies contributed to evaluation and outcomes in developing new strategies to manage stress, and family conflict and distress, together with developing new strategies in sharing a vision for the future across the community.

There is growing interest in the economic evaluation of public health prevention initiatives and increasing government awareness of the societal costs of conduct disorder in early childhood. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the cost-effectiveness of the Incredible Years (IY) BASIC parenting programme compared with a six-month waiting list control.

Cost-effectiveness analysis alongside a pragmatic randomised controlled trial of a group-parenting programme. The primary outcome measure was the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), a measure of child behaviour.

The IY programme was found to have a high probability of being cost-effective, shifting an additional 23 per cent of children from above the clinical concern to below the cut-off on the SDQ compared to the control group, at a cost ranging from £1612-£2418 per child, depending on the number of children in the group.

The positive findings of this study have led to ongoing implementation of the IY programme and is therefore an example of commitment to evidence-based service provision and investment in prevention initiatives.

This article reviews the contents of the previous year's editions of the Journal of Children's Services (Volume 2, 2007), as requested by the Journal's editorial board. It draws out some of the main messages for how high‐quality scientific research can help build good childhoods in western developed countries, focusing on: the need for epidemiology to understand how to match services to needs; how research can build evidence of the impact of prevention and intervention services on child well‐being; what the evidence says about how to implement proven programmes successfully; the economic case for proven programmes; the urgency of improving children's material living standards; how to help the most vulnerable children in society; and, lastly, the task of measuring child well‐being.

This paper aims to review selected effective interventions (available in the United Kingdom) for middle childhood (9‐13 years) to reduce the risk of, or current/subsequent involvement in, anti‐social behaviour and criminality.

Electronic databases and reviews of evidence‐based effective programmes were searched to identify family, school, child and community programmes that are available in the United Kingdom.

Despite current public policy emphasis on “early intervention”, there are increasing numbers of effective interventions for this older age range available within the UK. Age‐appropriate risk‐reduction interventions reflect family, school, community, and peer influences.

This paper, read in conjunction with other age‐specific contributions in this volume, demonstrates the growing viability of evidence‐based strategies that support children and their families to reduce known risk factors for behavioural problems, and respond to antisocial and criminal behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the effectiveness of directive programmes led by professionals where parents were taught specific parenting knowledge and strategies (Triple P – Positive Parenting Program) and non-directive parenting programmes in the form of mutual-aid support group as a universal prevention programme.

This study employed a randomised controlled trial design. Participants included 92 Hong Kong Chinese parents with preschool children recruited from eight kindergartens and a local church. They were randomised into Group Triple P, non-directive group and control group. They completed measures on their perception of child behaviour problems and their parental stress before and after intervention.

At post-intervention, results indicated significantly greater decrease in child disruptive behaviours among participants in the Triple P group than those in the non-directive group and control group while no significant group difference was found between the latter two groups. No significant difference was found in post-intervention parental stress level among the three groups.

This study provides empirical evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of a directive parenting programme vs a non-directive one.