Archways basis.point Incredible Years Programme July 2016 Progress Report

Archways basis.point Initiative training sessions
As part of the Archways basis.point Initiative, Archways have run three Incredible Years (IY) training sessions in total, two IY Teacher Classroom Management (TCM) sessions for 33 school staff to attend 6 full day workshops and one IY basic parent group leader session.

Incredible Years Parent Group Leader Training and Support
In January, implementation and research workshops were offered to the staff of the 6 community organisations that had attended the IY parent group leader training led by Dr Sean Mc Donnell. In addition, seven extra support and supervision sessions were provided by Sean with one of the community organisations, Hill Street Family Resource Centre, who were getting ready to start delivering the programme. This support ensured that the programme was delivered to help achieve the best outcomes possible for the families prior to and during the 14 week (January – April) IY parent programme delivery.

The local families that engage with Hill St Family Resource Centre come from socio-economic disadvantage and ethnic minority backgrounds. To date, around 21 families have either completed the 14 week IY parent programme or are engaging in the shorter parent programme over the summer months. This shorter introduction programme was implemented to try and engage these families into the next scheduled 14 week IY parent programme due to commence in September.

Liked doing the prepatory work in the workshop and trying out strategies (in the classroom) and then feeding back to the group in the next workshop.

Last month, Fiona Mulcahy from basis.point and Aileen O’Donoghue from Archways met a small number of parents and some of the Hill Street staff who had just completed delivering the parent programme”.

This was an opportunity to hear first-hand both the Hill St staff and the parents’ experiences of doing the programme. Parents reported better relationships between child and parent and between the parents and the school.

There was an increase in parental self-confidence with more positive parenting, an increase in positive family communication including reduced use of criticism and negative commands and an increase in child-directed play.

TCM Programme
33 school staff in two separate training groups completed six TCM workshops that were scheduled during the months November to February 2016. The programme provided the trained school staff with procedures for promoting good behaviour for the children and helped develop their emotional intelligence. The school staff that attended the training noted an improvement in children’s attitudes towards learning and the overall standard of their behaviour. Michael Logan and Paul Johnston from Archways who led the training observed that the two trained groups of school staff over the 6 workshops experienced less non-compliance and increased compliance behaviour in the classroom. The teachers were generally more positive and used more direct commands with the children, allowed longer time for compliance and that the teachers increased their use of praise.

As part of the current Archways basis.point Initiative, the final TCM training has been scheduled to start in September, with staff from a number of schools having reserved a place on the training.

We are also delighted to note that following on from the success of the programme, one of the Area Based Childhood (ABC) programmes run from DIT in Grangegorman is committed to funding an additional number of schools to train in the IY TCM programme in the Dublin 7 area.