Together for Childhood | NSPCC Learning

What is Together for Childhood?

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.

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.

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.

Locations

Together for Childhood locations

The NSPCC is delivering Together for Childhood in four areas.

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

Evaluation

Evaluating Together for Childhood

Our approach

Our aim is to understand how we’re making the communities we’re working in safer for children. We do this through an innovative, continuous process of learning and development.

Together for Childhood has embedded researchers who work with communities to collect stories of change, gather insight into what each place needs and grow our understanding of how to prevent child abuse and help children recover from abuse.

A mix of local and cross-site projects leads to learning for each local area as well as contributing to the overall lessons for place-based interventions.

We use participatory and creative methods to ensure our research is accessible and relevant to the communities we’re working with whilst meeting the robust and rigorous standards of all NSPCC research.

We share findings with the communities, partners and stakeholders we work with as well as publishing our findings on our website and presenting at conferences and networking events so that everyone can benefit from the learning.

> Read our series of Together for Childhood research reports and evaluations

Local research and evaluations

We start by conducting research to understand the specific nature of need within the individual Together for Childhood sites.

Working collaboratively with local teams, we use the research findings to develop bespoke interventions that aim to achieve the overall goal of preventing child abuse.

We evaluate these interventions using process and outcomes focused evaluation methods to understand what we have achieved through each intervention and how.

This learning is then shared back with the local sites and more broadly with key NSPCC audiences to improve and develop our services.

> Read our latest local evaluation report

Multi-site research and evaluation

Our larger multi-site research and evaluation projects allow us to gain cross-site learning and evidence larger findings about place-based models than a local evaluation can achieve alone.

We use process and outcomes focused research methods to:

identify how and why the changes we’re seeing have happened
understand the knowledge, attitudes and behaviours of those directly involved in protecting children
discover what a place-based approach has achieved against our goal of preventing child abuse.

When sharing our learning we balance overall insight about the unique nature working in a place-based way with findings specific to Together for Childhood sites.

> Read our most recent multi-site research here