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

7. Conclusion

7.1 What aspects of the CfC initiative were responsible for these outcomes?

Previous research, as well as common knowledge, indicates that providing families with a network of positive community relationships, and providing access to community resources and services, can help support children’s development.

On balance, the current findings suggest that the early stage of the implementation of the CfC service model has been modestly successful, particularly when seen in the light of findings from the Sure Start initiative (the comparable intervention in the UK), and when one considers that children who participated in the SFIA study would have only received services from approximately 3 years of age. As the CfC programs continue to operate and improve in terms of access, outreach and effectiveness, one might expect even larger differences between children and families exposed to the initiative and those who are not (as was demonstrated by Sure Start and other similar programs). Only further follow-up of this group of children and their families will enable an assessment of whether these positive early findings persist and translate into larger differences in the longer-term. Further, outcomes for CfC sites may well appear more favourable if the children studied had the benefit of the initiative from birth, as intended.

The overall pattern of results suggested that the CfC initiative impacted on outcomes in a positive direction (64 to 74 per cent of outcomes, depending on the statistical model estimated). In relation to parenting, it appears that the CfC initiative was successful in changing parenting practices among mothers overall (less harsh parenting and greater parenting self-efficacy) and reducing harsh parenting among hard-to-reach mothers. There were also positive but not statistically significant changes in parental behaviour for the low maternal education and low-income subgroups.

There was evidence that the CfC intervention reduced the rate of joblessness in CfC sites for the sample overall and for many subgroups as well. While the findings for this outcome appear to be statistically robust (they emerged using both estimation approaches and after controlling for individual site differences), it is difficult to know the precise mechanism by which the CfC intervention impacted upon joblessness. It is feasible that this level of change could be attributed to greater community engagement and participation, and denser networks of relationships surrounding families in CfC sites, leading to opportunities for employment (for example, Stone, Gray & Hughes 2003).

7.1 What aspects of the CfC initiative were responsible for these outcomes?

The CfC initiative involved essentially three new innovations to services for children in their early years and their families:

A legitimate question to be asked would be whether the extra expenditure on service coordination and community development was justified or, to put it another way, whether it would be more effective to simply hand over resources to provide higher levels of services.

The fact that the effect sizes of CfC were comparable to, if not greater than, many programs that provide direct services, and that these effects were evident for children in the CfC communities irrespective of whether they had actually received services, seems to point towards an additional effect over and above the provision of new services. Indeed, positive change in relation to parental involvement in community activities, joblessness and social cohesion supports the idea that ‘community embededness’ may have an additional effect on children and families, and that provision of increased services on their own would not have achieved this aim.

While this early evaluation produced positive results, the ‘whole-of-community’ early childhood intervention model is highly unstructured and unstandardised; thus, the integrity and quality of the design and implementation of the CfC model will most likely have an effect on the outcomes achieved. Which key design and program elements are most efficacious is a critical question that deserves further empirical inquiry (see discussion in the national evaluation report—Muir et al. 2009).

Notwithstanding the fact that CfC sites in the current study were not representative of remote localities and communities with a high Indigenous population, the results were largely unchanged in analyses controlling for individual site differences. This suggests that it is the ‘CfC model’, and not some characteristic particular to one or other CfC site that was driving the results. Indeed, the current evaluation suggests that the CfC model can make an important contribution to the family and community contexts in which disadvantaged children grow up, and in terms of their wellbeing. Whether the CfC is a strategy that can sustain benefits in the long term, and whether longer exposure to the CfC initiative at a later stage in operation can produce greater benefits is unclear.

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