The SFSC:Safer Lives project, funded by the Youth Endowment Fund, saw the delivery of the Race Equality Foundation’s evidence based Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities (SFSC) programme to parents of young people involved in or at risk of violence and offending behaviour.
SFSC delivery took place in Lambeth and Southwark, and in Hackney, for parents and carers of children aged 11-18, supported by the local youth offending services. Alongside it, a feasibility study was carried out by UCL to test the acceptability of the intervention and to establish the optimal design (including methodology and measures) for a future impact evaluation of SFSC:Safer Lives.
SFSC:Safer Lives, delivered by the Race Equality Foundation, in partnership with the Youth Endowment Fund, aims to reduce children’s involvement in violence. The programme provides a six-day training programme to facilitators who then deliver weekly group sessions to 6-10 parents and carers. Sessions last 3 hours each and are delivered over 13 weeks.
Sessions focus on:
- providing parents/carers with strategies to enhance relationships
- managing behaviour
- understanding children’s development stages
- meeting children’s needs
- supporting parents and carers to understand their own ethnic culture and family context
- Understanding the drivers of children’s involvement in violence.
The evaluation explored the feasibility of SFSC:Safer Lives, analysed which aspects of the original SFSC may require refinement, developed and tested a recruitment and retention process, evaluated the feasibility of measuring behaviour and offending, examined overall reach, uptake, retention and acceptability of SFSC:Safer Lives, and produced a logic model for the programme.
The findings show that parents on the SFSC programmes liked it and found it useful. But many struggled to attend all the sessions due to busy lives and work commitments. Children were largely accepting of completing questionnaires, but this was challenging and the questions we ask them need to be improved. The evaluation team recommend progressing to a larger evaluation of SFSC to examine if the programme can make reduce youth violence.
Read the full report here.