CREATE Project Bulletin – April 30, 2018

April 30, 2018

This bulletin aims to provide an overview of recent project developments. Future editions, which we plan for the end of each month, will be more attractively formatted, but we have settled for a plain version this month rather than delay something that we have long promised.

This bulletin will be posted as a blog on the Project Management Portal. Please log into your secure account (using your username and password that were sent some months ago) to view and comment: https://www.creatingpathways.org.au/project-management/project-management-portal.

We are also offering a Q&A teleconference for anyone interested in continuing the conversation, at 2pm on Tuesday May 15: Call (07) 373 59777 (Meeting Number: 999 861 047#)

Please feel free to distribute this Bulletin to individuals within your organisation who are interested in the project, including Program Managers, and please invite them to call in for the Q&A on the 15th of May.

 

PROJECT OVERVIEW AND KEY EVENTS

Brisbane Prevention Science Forum

We have had many reminders this year of the critical importance of building prevention infrastructure for schools and community agencies if Australia is to have any hope of ‘closing the gap’ in wellbeing and educational performance for children living in our most disadvantaged communities.

Most recently CREATE Project collaborator and research adviser, Dr Brian Bumbarger, visited Australia and spoke at several events, including a Prevention Science Forum at the Children’s Hospital in Brisbane on March 26, jointly organised by ARACY and Children’s Health Queensland. In his keynote address, Brian discussed the Inverse Care Law – those who fall behind early need more, but get less.

His key messages were:

• Most wicked problems are preventable
• Currently our public systems and community capacities don’t represent enabling contexts for our knowledge of what works
• The underlying theory that enables us to prevent costly problems also provides a heuristic for cross-system collaboration
• Greater investment in prevention, coupled with greater investment in capacity-building infrastructure, can maximize the future potential of Australia’s workforce and economy.

The CREATE project aims to address the need for greater investment in capacity-building infrastructure, through research and development of resources, tools and the Collective Impact Facilitator role within CfC project sites. This is what we call the

Prevention and Translation Support System (PTSS), which is being designed to serve the Delivery System represented by community agencies, schools, and other organisations.

A full summary of the Prevention Science Forum has been prepared by Charmaine Stubbs (CIF at Logan CfC, with the Salvation Army) and Sara Branch, and can be accessed on the Project Management Portal under ‘Items of Interest’ (note that you will need to log in):
https://www.creatingpathways.org.au/project-management/project-management-portal/items-of-interest/

 

Academy of Social Sciences 2018 Hancock Lecturer

Ross Homel has been asked by the Academy of Social Sciences to present the 2018 Sir Keith Hancock Lectures. The Hancock lecture series aims to communicate cutting edge social science research to the general community. Ross delivered the first version of the lecture in Brisbane on March 8 and spoke along similar lines to Brian, focusing on the urgent need in Australia to build a human and technological infrastructure for applying the fruits of prevention science research. This infrastructure will help to ‘shift the dial’ for disadvantaged children at the whole-of-population level. He used the methods and tools being developed for the CREATE Project as illustration.

The lecture can viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP_7LoEOntw&feature=youtu.be and will be delivered again at the University of Melbourne at 6pm on September 13, during Social Science Week, in the Prest Theatre – Ground Floor, FBE Building, 111 Barry Street Carlton VIC.

AEDC Conference

Ross Homel and Kate Freiberg presented on Rumble’s Quest at the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) conference on 13-16 March. This year, the theme of the conference was “Learning from the Australian story: What we know works to improve outcomes for children.” Brian Bumbarger was one amongst a group of outstanding keynote speakers. His use of the CREATE video during his presentation (accessible via https://www.creatingpathways.org.au ) generated a lot of interest in the project, as did the Rumble’s Quest presentation.

 

PRACTICAL MATTERS – FUNDING, STAFFING MEETINGS, AND PARTNERSHIP CHANGES

Funding: After more than six months, we still have no news from the Australian Research Council on whether our application for two years of funding for Phase 3 of the Project has been successful. Assuming we hear within the next few weeks, Phase 3 should formally begin early in 2019, allowing the rest of this year for Project Partners to review and sign the ARC Collaborative Agreements.

Project Officer: Many of you will know that in late February we appointed Alexandra McGhie for 12 months as a full time Project Officer at Griffith. Alex hit the ground running and did an enormous amount to get our ‘back end systems’ working better. However she recently accepted an unexpected but attractive job offer from Queensland Health. Her new role fits well with her long experience working in the health sector, and also offers more career opportunities than we were able to provide. We wish her well as she settles into her new position.

DSS Partner Investigator: In October last year Marian Esler replaced Emma Snelson as our Partner Investigator within DSS and member of the CREATE Executive Oversight Committee (the key governing body for the project). Marian is very experienced in the child and family field, but moved back to her earlier work in Family Safety & Domestic Violence a few weeks ago. Marian will remain involved as our official Partner Investigator but has nominated Kim Laing as our main DSS representative on a day-to-day basis. Kim is Assistant Director, Families and Children.

Face-to Face Project Meeting in Sydney mid-2018: This strategic planning meeting is intended to facilitate a smooth transition from Phase 2 (Coming Together and Deciding Together) to the ARC-funded Phase 3 (Planning Together, Doing Together, and Reviewing Together). There will be an opportunity for all partners to review project governance processes, review progress in Phases 1 and 2, and engage in planning for Phase 3. The NSW Department of Education has kindly offered to host this meeting. Further details about the meeting, which will most likely be held sometime in July, will be provided in due course to those attending.

 

RESEARCH TEAM VISITS TO CFC PROJECT SITES IN NSW AND QUEENSLAND

Various members of the research team visited eight of our nine project sites between February 6 (Cairns South) and April 19 (Logan): five in NSW and three in Queensland.

We greatly valued and enjoyed these visits. We were especially impressed with each site’s strong connection to schools, and with local Aboriginal Elders and groups. Sites shared information about some of the innovative ways they are engaging with community members.

For example, the team at 2168 (Miller) facilitate the 2168 Children’s Parliament, a child voice project that provides a platform, which supports rights and civics education, and discussion on and advocacy for issues identified by local children. Another example of this is the Children’s University within the Rosemeadow and Ambarvale site. The Fairfield site is also engaged in an innovative community consultation and strengthening process based on The Harwood Approach. The team at Raymond Terrace and Karuah call on a combination of data and their deep ties with local Aboriginal Elders to guide their approach. The team at Taree have engaged in an impressive consultation process with over 200 parents to help identify a number of community priorities such as Bullying. The Cairns South site along with their ambitious Collective Impact project have developed a Community Reference Group, which is another example of the innovative approaches to involving community members in the Communities for Children work. Within Logan, the team is supporting the development of the Logan Children’s Charter, which will include children in the decision-making and planning of city-wide action.

The site visits have highlighted the unique strengths of each site, as well as the complex, multi-layered nature of the local networks fostered by the CfC partnership through many forms of community engagement. This information continues to inform the research team’s action learning cycle. An immediate example of this has been the way the Ipswich-to-Inala team’s discussion of their complex structure, which includes multiple Collective Action Groups, identified scope to include an additional feature within the reporting function of the Coalition Wellbeing Survey. This feature will help Program Managers and coalition leadership teams better understand possible variations in the experience of different groups of members. The work to incorporate this additional function into the survey administration dashboard has been completed. This experience reinforces the way project partners play a critical role in the co-design and refinement of the Prevention Support System resources.

 

COMING TOGETHER AND DECIDING TOGETHER PLANS FOR 2018

1. The Coming Together activities include:
   1. Development of the Community Coalition Wellbeing Survey (CCWS) Integrated Resource Package;
   2. Implementation of the Package in the nine CREATE Project CfC sites, and (ideally) in comparison CfC sites in both states;
   3. Development and implementation of an action plan developed by Program Managers and CIFs in light of the CCWS data.
2. We learned from the visits to seven of the nine project CfC sites in February and March that Program Managers are mostly planning to run the survey between mid-April and the end of May. The technology is accessible to community coalitions through the CreatingPathways.org.au community portal.
3. Deciding Together development is being undertaken by a small group within the research team: Kate Freiberg (team leader); Lisa Thomsen (PhD scholar and senior research assistant); Brian Bumbarger (consultant), and Ross Homel (project co-director). This work involves several components.
   1. Assessment of the AEDC data and Rumble’s Quest data by CfC coalitions, including schools (state and Catholic). The purpose of the assessment is to identify 3-4 priority child risk and protective factors that can become the goals for the delivery of programs through the CfC coalition, including schools.
      1. We are making these data available, in user-friendly form with on-line supports, at the whole CfC community level, and at the level of SA2s within CfC regions, given the great variation in levels of social deprivation across CfC areas.
      2. Step (a) depends on Rumble’s Quest statistical reports being made available to the research project by schools. This data acquisition will take place during Term 3, 2018, subject to department of education approvals and processes.
      3. We are in the process of requesting individual item data from the AEDC for the social competence and emotional maturity domains, which will be assessed alongside the 57 items from Rumble’s Quest (and the five executive function scores). We hope to have the item data before Term 3.
      4. A critical step in the determination of priority risk/protective factors is to overlay the community AEDC/RQ profiles with risk factor matrices derived from longitudinal research on child maltreatment, youth crime, substance abuse, and school dropout. The methodology for doing this will be incorporated in the on-line support resources, although in the first iteration this year we won’t be able to incorporate any ‘bells and whistles.’
   2. A further step is to consider the priority risk/protective factors in light of community-level administrative/census data. Many CfC communities have already assembled some of this information in ‘state of the child’ reports, and the research team is in the process of finalising the collation of a range of data that we hope will complement any existing community data sets. Our data are available at the whole CfC level, as well as at the SA2 level. Data items include NAPLAN scores; suspensions, exclusions and enrolments (Qld only at this stage: permission for access from NSW pending); perinatal health; community safety (police assault statistics, with domestic violence separately identified in NSW); and SEIFA and demographic data. These data strongly reflect human service and education system effects, and therefore are an important part of the deciding together process.
4. Normally Step 3a would precede Step 3b, but because the Rumble’s Quest and AEDC data will not be available until sometime in Term 3, we propose working with communities initially on the available community data to decide on key child priorities. These priorities will then be reviewed in light of the RQ and AEDC data.
5. Our site visits revealed variation in the extent to which CfC coalitions are linked in with schools. In general, however, we expect that CfC Program Managers and the CIFs will drive the Deciding Together steps, and will develop locally-appropriate ways of incorporating schools in the decision-making processes. We do know that many school principals have extensive data, long experience, and strong views on the needs of children in their communities.
6. Some communities may be able to move into the Planning Together phase before the end of the year, which involves an assessment of the appropriateness of existing resources, activities and programs in light of the priority risk/protective factors, followed by the selection if necessary of new evidence-based programs. We do not expect that this last step will be completed much before mid-2019, in the lead up to the expected next phase of DSS CfC funding.

Category: Project Newsletter

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