This research review examines what is known about the effectiveness of parenting support, and assesses the international evaluation evidence focusing on primary and secondary prevention programmes. It outlines several factors affecting the success of parenting support interventions in terms of service implementation and delivery, as well as outcomes for children and parents. The conclusions highlight the need for more rigorous UK-based evaluations, and for further investigation of the support services for specific parenting groups such as very vulnerable families, fathers, and ethnically diverse families. The review also underlines the need for further national policies that address the broader social inequalities affecting the impact of parenting programmes.

For much of the past two decades, expensive and often imported evidencebased programmes (EBPs) developed by clinician-researchers have been much in vogue in the family and parenting support field, as in many other areas of social provision. With their elaborate infrastructures, voluminous research bases and strict licensing criteria, they have seemed to offer certainty of success over less packaged, less well-evidenced locally developed approaches. Yet recently, evaluation research is showing that success is not assured. EBPs can and regularly do fail, at substantial cost to the public purse. In times of severe resource pressure, a pressing question is, therefore, whether lower cost, home-grown, practitioner-developed programmes-the sort often overlooked by policy-makers-can deliver socially significant and scientifically convincing outcomes at lower cost and at least on a par with their better resourced cousins. This paper shows how the application of techniques increasingly used in implementation science (the science of effective delivery) could help level the playing field. Processes for doing this including co-produced theory of change development and validation are illustrated with reference to the Family Links Ten Week Nurturing Programme (FLNP-10), a popular manualised group-based parenting support programme, designed and disseminated since the 1990s by a UK-based purveyor organisation. The paper draws out general principles for formulating and structuring strong theories of change for practice improvement projects. The work shows that novel application of implementation science-informed techniques can help home-grown programmes to compete scientifically by strengthening their design and delivery, and preparing the ground for better and fairer evaluation.

Background:  Increasing recognition of the importance of maternal mental health and early parenting in optimising the later mental health of the child has given rise to new ways of working during the perinatal period. Aims:  The objective of this review is to identify effective health‐led interventions to support parents, parenting and the parent‐infant relationship during the perinatal period,1 and beyond. Method:  A systematic search of key electronic databases was undertaken to identify secondary and primary sources of data addressing the research question. Twenty‐four reviews addressed the effectiveness of interventions delivered during the postnatal period in promoting closeness and sensitive parenting, infant sensory and perceptual capabilities, and positive parenting, and in addressing infant regulatory problems, maternal mental health problems, and parent‐infant relationship problems. Conclusions:  A number of methods of working are recommended as part of a model of progressive‐universalism beginning ante‐natally and continuing through the first two post‐natal years, and beyond. The implications for universal, targeted and specialist healthcare services are explored, alongside the role and contribution of CAMHS practitioners.

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SUMMARY. This paper explores the relationship between the reading attainment of a group of 8–14 year olds in long‐term foster care and factors in their histories and current home environments. The findings suggest that children's early histories before entry to care may have an effect on their educational attainment in middle childhood. Some amelioration of early childhood experience may be found in a stable foster home placement which has an expectation of permanence. The type of permanent placement seems less important than the expectation of stability. There was no difference in progress between children where the eventual outcome might be adoption or custodianship and those who would remain foster children. Of especial interest was the fact that the foster children's educational attainment was not related either positively or negatively to contact with their birth parents.