Together for Childhood

Introduction

Working together in new ways to prevent abuse

Together for Childhood is an innovative, evidence-informed approach. It brings local partners and families together to make our communities safer for children.

Working collaboratively, we’ll develop and test effective approaches for preventing child abuse, drawing on examples of best practice from around the world.

We are creating a wide range of local partnerships between social care, schools, health, voluntary and community groups, alongside the police, NSPCC and communities.

Goals

Together for Childhood aims to:

prevent child abuse and neglect in families facing adversity
prevent child sexual abuse and support children and their families.

This project aims to achieve systems change, which is about addressing how agencies and organisations work together to prevent abuse. It also uses a place-based approach, focusing action at a local scale to achieve its goals.

How it works

How Together for Childhood works

We use three types of interventions to achieve our goals:

primary (universal) interventions – stopping abuse before it occurs, such as campaigning to raise awareness of what sexual abuse is
secondary (targeted) interventions – reducing the impact of an ongoing issue, such as delivering services that help families experiencing domestic abuse
tertiary (specialist) interventions – helping children after abuse has occurred.

Locations

Together for Childhood locations

The NSPCC is delivering Together for Childhood in:

Glasgow – preventing abuse in families facing adversity
Grimsby – preventing abuse in families facing adversity
Plymouth – preventing child sexual abuse
Stoke on Trent – preventing child sexual abuse.

> Find contact details for all our service centres on the NSPCC website

If you work with children in one of these locations and are interested in finding out more or how you can get involved, please email TogetherforChildhood@nspcc.org.uk.

Evaluation

Evaluation of Together for Childhood

We’re committed to robustly evaluating Together for Childhood with the development of a multi-stranded evaluation for each area. Local evaluation officers are embedded in each site and we aim to learn lessons from the implementation of Together for Childhood.

At the heart of Together for Childhood is continuous learning and improvement. This is in contrast to more traditional models, where learning and development are seen as the final step and the end result of the evaluation.

> Read our implementation evaluation report

How we’re evaluating this service

The evaluation activity covers three strands:

Process evaluation

Our evaluation model for Together for Childhood is developmental and participatory with a significant focus on implementation and outcomes. The aim is to understand the key stakeholder implementation and to understand the local context in which Together for Childhood is being developed.

Findings from the process evaluation across all sites will be fed back throughout the lifetime of the project to inform development.

Outcomes evaluation

The outcomes evaluation tracks changes quantitatively in the core outcomes across all sites. This will be supplemented by an approach called the Most Significant Change which explores reported qualitative outcomes from the perspectives of stakeholders who are involved with different elements of the project.

Local evaluation

Activities and programmes will be developed to achieve the overall outcomes. We will work with local partners to understand how these will contribute to the overall impact of Together for Childhood and explore outcomes specific to the programme as well as service users’ experiences of the initiatives.