The “Incredible Years” Programmes
Seattle :
The Parenting Programmes The Child Therapeutic and Classroom Dinosaur School Programme The Child Dinosaur School in the Classroom Programme
The Teacher Classroom Management Programme Early intervention preventive work using the programmes Wales :
The Child Behaviour Project The Welsh Centre for Promoting the Incredible Years Local work and current research into the effectiveness of the Incredible Years Parenting Programmes
Seattle:
For further information on the background to and research into these programmes visit www.incredibleyears.com
The Parenting Programmes:
About 25 years ago, at the University of Washington, Seattle, Carolyn Webster-Stratton started developing and researching a parenting programme for children referred for help with significant behavioural and related problems. This programme evolved into the “basic” twelve week Incredible Years parenting programme and her research evidence showed that the programme was effective in bringing about improvements for a significant number of referred children. However, as with most parenting programmes, it was only effective for about 2/3rds of the children and not all of those maintained their progress over the following three years.
Since adult depression and relationship difficulties seemed to predict poor outcomes, Professor Webster-Stratton then developed the “Advanced” programme, an eight session add on programme focused on adult relationship and problem solving skills and strategies to help children to become more effective problem solvers. This resulted in significant gains for families who, with the basic programme alone, did not make gains or if they did make gains did not maintain them. However some children, although their behaviour at home and relationship with their parent/s improved, still had difficulties at school and in peer relationships.
Professor Webster-Stratton’s final step with the parenting programme was to develop a further module to the programme, “helping your child to do their best in school”. This focused on academic skills and promoting improved home-school links. Her evidence shows that for clinic referred children, with difficulties at both home and school, parents will need all of these programmes to bring about sustained improvements.
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The Child Therapeutic Dinosaur School Programme.
Even with the expanded series of parenting programmes, there were still some children for whom no gains were evident. This led Professor Webster-Stratton in the early 1990s to devise a programme for the referred children themselves, the Therapeutic Dinosaur School programme. This is an eighteen session programme, run for two hours a week, for groups of six referred children. It teaches social and problem solving skills, anger management, friendship and academic skills such as concentrating and checking. The addition of Dinosaur School further improved child outcomes, the parenting programme showing increased parental praise, reduced parent criticism, improvements in parent-child relationships and child compliance at home and the Dinosaur programme showed improvements in child friendships with peers, problem solving and academic attainment.
The Child Dinosaur School in the Classroom Programme
A recent development has been to redesign the small group Dinosaur School programme as a universal classroom programme for children in their early school years. The programme employs strategies to promote children's non-aggressive ways to solve common conflicts, appropriate classroom behaviours and positive social skills with other children and adults. The skills taught improve social and emotional competence in children and enhance their abilities to do well in school and make and keep friends.
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The Teacher Classroom Management Programme
As the parent and child interventions became known, teachers of the referred children, with whom Prof. Webster-Stratton was working started to ask for advice on how to manage the children in the classroom. About eight years ago Prof. Webster-Stratton developed a course for teachers in classroom management. She obtained video footage of classroom situations and developed the, one day per month, five day teacher programme. Not surprisingly the addition of this programme resulted in even better child outcomes and the evidence is clear that for severely challenging children, with well established problems, their chances of making and maintaining gains is considerably greater when all three programmes are used. This is particularly the case for those children with the most significant problems who are most at risk of long-term delinquency, drug abuse and violent criminality.
Early intervention preventive work using the programmes
Having developed the parent, child and teacher programmes for referred children with severely challenging behaviour, for the last six years Prof. Webster-Stratton has taken these programmes into Head Start early intervention services targetting high risk pre-school children. Her current research is looking at the parenting and teacher programmes alongside a universal classroom dinosaur school programme, which is delivered twice a week to whole classes of children throughout their first two years in school.
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Wales:
The Child Behaviour Project
The Project was set up by Dr. Hutchings in 1995 to research interventions to reduce or prevent behavioural difficulties in children and to disseminate evidence based interventions to support children and families throughout Wales. Since that time it has undertaken research with parents, children and professionals.
Since meeting Professor Webster-Stratton of the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1996, Dr. Hutchings has been developing the use of Webster-Stratton’s Incredible Years parent, child and teacher programmes and, since October 2002, has been researching the basic parenting programme as an early preventive intervention with parents of high risk pre-school children from Sure Start areas across North Wales.
With over 20 years of evidence from randomised controlled trials, the Incredible Years programmes have been identified, in every systematic review of evidence based interventions to prevent and reduce violence, as “blueprint” programmes, attaining the highest standards of scientific respectability and they are now being delivered and researched across the world.
Recently Dr. Hutchings has concentrated her efforts on disseminating these programmes throughout Wales for the following reasons:
1. There are programmes for parents, children and teachers, enabling co-ordination of strategies across agencies.
2. They are collaborative programmes in which the parent, child or teacher is encouraged to recognize their own expertise and to engage in shared problem solving, thereby enhancing self esteem and ownership of skills taught.
3. They teach social and problem solving skills alongside strategies to reduce problem behaviours.
4. The programmes all receive high satisfaction ratings and engage more people than most other similar programmes, e.g. over 90% of high risk Head Start parents signed up for and attended over 75% of the parenting programme. Most programmes in this field are effective with, at best, about 2/3rds of families.
5. The parent programmes have evidence of long-term outcomes (over 10 years) which is essential when dealing with problems, such as delinquency, that have long trajectories.
6. The programmes have been replicated numerous times by independent researchers in both academic and service settings.
7. The main evidence base is in the US but there is a growing evidence base emerging from England and Wales, as well as Norway and Canada.
8. There is evidence of their effectiveness as both therapeutic and early intervention preventive programmes
9. They have detailed training programmes that teach both the specific programme content and collaborative delivery process of each programme.
10. They have high quality and engaging materials, which include detailed leader checklists and resources making it easier for the programmes to be delivered in the evidence based way that they have been researched.
11. There are leader self-evaluation checklists to enable leaders to review their own performance and a leader certification process that enables leaders to ensure that they are delivering the programme with ‘fidelity” i.e. in an evidence based way.
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The Welsh Centre for Promoting the Incredible Years Programmes
We are fortunate to have had a direct research link with Prof. Webster-Stratton who is a collaborator on our current health foundation grant. We have visited the University of Washington and seen the programmes in action and we have had Prof. Webster-Stratton’s support for our efforts in Wales through training and consultation over recent years. This resulted in the establishment of “The Welsh Centre for Promoting the Incredible Years Programmes” because we have:
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