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Stronger Families in Australia study: the impact of Communities for Children

1. Introduction

This report presents the results of the evaluation of the short-run impacts of the Communities for Children (CfC) initiative on child, family and community outcomes, referred to here as the Stronger Families in Australia (SFIA) evaluation study.1

Communities for Children was one of three models of service delivery funded under the Australian Government’s Stronger Families and Communities Strategy (SFCS) 2004–2009. The CfC initiative aimed to:

Under the CfC initiative, the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) funded non-government organisations as ‘Facilitating Partners’ in 45 geographic areas around Australia to develop and implement a whole-of-community approach to enhancing early childhood development.

The Facilitating Partners were funded with the objective of increasing cooperation and collaboration among local service providers and thus improving outcomes for families with young children. This involved local, devolved decision-making in the management and allocation of Australian Government funds. In implementing each local initiative, Facilitating Partners established Communities for Children committees and managed the overall funding allocation in their communities. Most of the funding was allocated to other local service providers, called Community Partners, to deliver the activities identified in the local Community Strategic and Service Delivery Plans. This funding model was used in an effort to foster service coordination and cooperation and was based on the logic that service effectiveness is dependent not only on the nature and number of services, but also on the degree of service integration.

The SFIA evaluation study is an evaluation of the impact of CfC. It was a central component of the SFCS evaluation 2004–2008 that was undertaken by the Social Policy Research Centre (SPRC) at the University of New South Wales and the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS).

The overarching aim of the SFIA evaluation study was to measure changes in child, family and community outcomes in CfC communities over the funding period, and potentially beyond. This aspect of the evaluation was designed to:

The outcomes examined included how families experienced local services, parents’ perceptions of community cohesion, parenting skills and confidence, child wellbeing, and the wellbeing of families as a whole. The specific outcomes on which it was expected that the CfC initiative might have a positive effect are outlined in the Stronger Families and Communities Strategy: national evaluation framework (SPRC & AIFS 2005), and relate to the four priority areas of the Stronger Families and Communities Strategy: healthy young families, supporting families and parents, early learning and care, and child-friendly communities.2 The fifth priority area, family and children’s services working together effectively as a system, was examined in other components of the SFCS evaluation.

The SFIA evaluation study involved the collection of data before and after the CfC intervention. A three-wave longitudinal study (that is, data collected on the same group of children at three points-in-time) was conducted with 2,202 families living in 10 sites that had a CfC program and five ‘contrast sites’ that did not have a CfC program but were in other ways comparable to the CfC sites at Wave 1.

Wave 1 was conducted over the period June to August 2006, which was during the consultation and partnership-building phase of the CfC initiative. This means that the CfC intervention could not have had an effect on children and their families at that point, and thus provides baseline data. The second wave was conducted around 9 to 10 months after Wave 1. Early implementation of CfC services and programs varied across the sites, and had commenced around the time of the Wave 2 data collection. The third wave of data collection was conducted in 2008, around 11 months after Wave 2 commenced. Wave 3 was conducted relatively shortly after the implementation of CfC program activities, and therefore, at that stage, the evaluation was of short-run effects. The short-run nature of the potential impacts and the fact that the intervention was intended to have an impact on all families living in CfC sites, and not just those who directly accessed services, means that any impact of CfC at this stage could be expected to be small. The effects of the CfC initiative were estimated by comparing child, family and community outcomes in the CfC sites and in the control non-CfC (contrast) sites.

The remainder of this report is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a brief description of community effects on child development. Area-based initiatives are also discussed, including a description of a prominent area-based initiative in the United Kingdom (UK). Sections 3 and 4 describe the SFIA evaluation study design and fieldwork, the statistical analysis, outcome measures, and a test of the validity of the contrast sites as a counterfactual. Section 5 outlines the results of the SFIA evaluation study. The practical importance of the evaluation findings are discussed next, followed by the differential impact of CfC on key subpopulations. The implications of the pattern of results are discussed in Section 6. The final section concludes.

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