Persuading parents to open up
Children’s centres and extended services require an understanding of parental needs if they are to develop and grow. Research is a very effective way to gauge these needs and to begin the process of creating new or alternative services
Encouraging young people to take the lead
What does ‘youth leadership’ mean to organisations which promote this aspiration and young people who are their target audience? Research conducted for the Prince’s Trust on behalf of the National Body for Youth Leadership (NBYL) consortium set out to find the answer
Ensuring you can deliver
Getting service delivery right is always important, no more so than when it involves early identification of and preventative intervention for children at risk of developing communication and learning needs
Using models to predict and manage childcare
Following a full Childcare Sufficiency Assessment (CSA) local authorities have a statutory obligation to review childcare sufficiency on an annual basis. The Government Office for the East Midlands (GOEM) has been working with a network of local authorities across the region to develop models of predicting and managing childcare and sufficiency indicators that will facilitate updates and future CSAs and allow for regional comparisons.
Designing and delivering new services
Understanding how offenders, ex-offenders and their families can influence services and policies that affect them is a challenge for criminal justice policy makers. It was a challenge they decided could be investigated through user involvement research
Improving service delivery
The CAF gives statutory and voluntary sector agencies working with children, young people and families an assessment tool to aid early identification of support needs. Evaluating the effectiveness of the CAF is therefore vital to the development of integrated early intervention services
Overcoming barriers and widening choice
The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) is committed to ensuring young people are participating in education and training and achieving their potential to 18 and beyond. To meet this objective the DCSF needed robust evidence on the barriers facing young people and a greater understanding of how to overcome them
Predicting the demand for childcare
Encouraging the development of successful childcare markets for local families requires more than the simple collating of current facts and figures. Increasingly the onus is on local authorities to find new and more effective ways to predict and manage childcare demand
Canvassing the opinions of new recruits
How and why young people choose a particular profession or job will inevitably vary according to their background and the opinions of families and friends
Problems during the transition from childhood to adulthood
While many young people experience difficulties and challenges during their youth, care leavers suffer more than most. This exclusive research was commissioned to determine if more needs to be done to support care leavers and improve their outcomes