What We Do
I used to harm myself. Steve, my keyworker, got me to go to a psychiatrist. Steve made me see that I had to do this for myself as well as the people around me.
Rainer young person
The CtC Process
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The CtC process works at both a local community and strategic level.
Analysis of the particular risks influencing children leads to a strategy where genuine priorities are targeted for action, allowing informed decisions to be taken about existing services and the most effective way of delivering them.
Gaps in provision are identified and filled by introducing new interventions which have a track record of success.
The CtC publication ‘Promising Approaches’ provides details of projects and initiatives which are known from long-term research evidence to be effective in reducing risk factors.
The Research base
Research shows there are influential risk factors in children's lives that increase the chances they will develop health and behaviour problems as they grow older.
Equally important, there are protective factors that help to shield young people from problems in circumstances that would otherwise place them at risk.
Using a school survey and a step by step approach, Rainer CtC makes it possible to map factors in the lives of local children that are making it more - or less - likely they will experience: school failure, school-age pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, or become involved in: drug abuse, violence and crime.
A public health approach to prevention
The expression ‘prevention is better than cure’ is as true of problems among young people as it is of ill health. Comparisons between the CtC programme and preventive health campaigns are especially appropriate because the basic approach is the same: reducing risks and increasing protection.
CtC aims to enhance the level of protection and to reduce the risks of antisocial behaviour and adolescent problems - making it less likely that children will be driven towards the margins of society as they grow into young adults.
Strategic Services
The CtC School Survey
CtC has developed a body of expertise in the identification, measurement and analysis of the risk and protective factors experienced by young people within a community.
A standardised questionnaire asks pupils about their experience in school, their friendships and peer groups, relationships with their families and their behaviour and attitudes.
The CtC School Survey can be used within the preventative strategy to profile the risk and protective factors of young people across an area, stratified geographically, by age and gender and / or by target group. Using this data and CtC’s’ Promising Approaches’ existing services can be profiled and assessed.
The CtC School Survey has been used in a UK wide study of levels of risk and protection factors, ‘Youth at Risk’. Findings of the survey can be used to benchmark local data sets.
Consultancy
CtC offers a consultancy service that includes resource assessment and strategic planning to local partnerships in England, Scotland and Wales.
The Community Programme
Currently supporting over 30 community programmes across the UK, CtC offers a comprehensive programme of training and technical support to local co-ordinators.
CtC is a new kind of prevention programme that confronts the disillusion and pessimism felt in disadvantaged, high crime neighbourhoods.
Its message of hope is that local people really can make a difference - uniting with key leaders and front-line agencies to plan a better future for children and young people in their community.
Other prevention programmes in Britain have targeted communities. Some have been based on partnerships of different interests and have adopted a multi-agency strategy. CtC, nevertheless, offers a way of working that is new.
It is the first time that systematic use has been made of the knowledge about overlapping risk and protective factors to target individuals, families, schools and communities through an holistic prevention programme.
Never before have communities been shown how to measure and map the major risk and protective factors for youth crime, drug abuse, school-age pregnancy and school failure in their neighbourhoods.
No existing programme ensures that genuine priorities are targeted using interventions.
