More research Chance UK

Chance UK is a rapidly expanding organisation offering mentoring to children aged between 5 and 11 with behavioural difficulties. Delivering its service through volunteers working with children over the course of one year Chance UK has embraced the solution focused approach from its very beginning. All new staff are trained in the solution focused approach at BRIEF and all the volunteers are also trained. It is expected that the approach will inform the volunteers’ way of thinking about the children with whom they work and to a considerable extent therefore their conversations with those children. The success of the work is therefore of particular interest to those of us from the solution focused world. So it is pleasing to note that not only has Chance UK won a host of awards, most recently for example the ‘Centre for Social Justice award for exceptional poverty fighting charities’, not only has its work been extensively acknowledged and recognised, including for instance the award in 2006 of Goldstar status by the Home Office, but even more importantly it has published research showing the real impact of the work on the children referred to the programme.

Peter K Smith and Sharon Howard of Goldsmiths University of London state: “Our main finding, and a most encouraging one, is of a substantial improvement in SDQ scores across the year on mentoring. (The SDQ is a brief behavioural screening questionnaire about 3-16 year olds.) The Total Difficulties scores decrease (all four subscales decrease), and the Pro-social scores increase. These changes are of the order of one standard deviation, which is quite a substantial effect.

“Overall, it appears that Chance UK mentoring is associated with a substantial overall improvement in SDQ scores, and that this holds true for all 3 raters – parents, teachers and mentors. This suggests an overall improvement in general behaviour, since these raters appear to be responding to different aspects of a child’s behaviour, in different contexts. ……The improvements are found in each year, for male and female mentors, male and female mentees, and across the range of children participating.”

Yet another example of the solution focused approach contributing to effective intervention in people’s lives. Find out more about the findings and the work of the Chance UK on www.chanceuk.com