The Early Intervention Foundation, Cabinet Office and the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission are conducting a review of the evidence base behind the skills variously referred to as Skills for Life and Work, character, social and emotional skills and non-cognitive skills, and what works to help young people develop these skills. A Glossary of the key skills and terminology is available here.
As part of this review, Demos is issuing a Call for Evidence among organisations and programmes operating in the UK that seek to develop these skills among children and adolescents.
The Call for Evidence will seek to identify programmes and approaches in the UK that directly aim to build or improve social and emotional skills in children and adolescents. It is envisaged that:
This call for evidence will augment a search for effective approaches in the peer-reviewed academic literature and grey literature of policy papers and Government and NGO reports. Please note that responding to this Call for Evidence does not necessarily mean that your programme will be included into the Guidebook or in the final report. We are particularly interested to identify programmes and approaches that address needs not met by the best evaluated programmes and approaches.
It is likely that further reviews of this topic area will be undertaken over the following year from March 2015 and programmes that do not meet the threshold for inclusion at this stage or are not able to meet the timeline for response this time around may be considered subsequently.
We are interested to identify programmes and structured approaches that have an evidence-based theory of change, a clear accounting of cost and the capacity to be implemented more broadly.
We use the terms 'programme' and 'approach' to refer to well-structured and clearly defined packages of activity that are replicable, have clearly defined outcomes and costs and the means to deliver the required quality of intervention either through fidelity to a manual or other forms of workforce support, monitoring and evaluation.
The types of programmes and approaches that we are interested include those that:
Although most programmes and approaches will be evaluated in terms of impacts on skills, it is expected that such programmes would have wider long term benefits for manifest outcomes such as reductions in criminality, violence, drug and alcohol abuse and for positive outcomes such as employment, volunteering and learning.
We are seeking to identify programmes that span a continuum of evidence standards. You can view the EIF Standards of Evidence here, but reference to other standards of evidence frameworks (including Project Oracle and Nesta) can be made in submissions as these frameworks are closely aligned.
The majority of programmes that will be selected for inclusion into the EIF Guidebook will need to have evaluations of impact (at Level 3 standards of evidence or above) and the capacity for broader implementation in the UK.
We expect also to include some programmes that have less well established evidence but do have aclear ‘theory of change’ alongside detailed operational information, including programme manuals, training of staff, and implementation and cost details.
Please click here to download the Call for Evidence submission form.
Click here to read more about how this Call for Evidence fits into the wider research project, conducted by the National University of Ireland Galway.
Please send your submissions to SEL.CallforEvidence@demos.co.uk by the 14th November.
If you have any questions, you can contact Jonathan Birdwell at Demos via email at jonathan.birdwell@demos.co.uk or via telephone on 020 7367 6336.
