Impact case study database

High quality, early childhood caregiving environments are critical in promoting long term benefits to educational achievement, mental and physical health, and economic prosperity of future generations in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). Bangor’s research into evidenced-based programmes for children’s carers have now reached over 5,500 teachers, more than 7,000 mothers and ultimately benefitted over 500,000 children globally.

The cluster randomised trials delivered training in the Irie Classroom Toolbox, a school-based violence prevention programme for early childhood teachers, to over 300 Jamaican teachers in preschools and primary schools. The roll-out of the research-based training led to immediate benefits in terms of a considerable decrease (more than 65%) in violence against children. Clear impacts were delivered during the research phase including benefits to class-wide child prosocial behaviour at post-intervention (Effect size (ES) = 0.42 standard deviations (SD)), the quality of the classroom environment (mean ES=0.58SD) and to teacher well-being at one-year follow-up (ES = 0.26SD). Benefits were found to children’s inhibitory control (ES = 0.18SD) and fewer children in intervention schools were in the clinical range for behaviour difficulties (Odds Ratio: 0.46). The Toolbox training thus delivered positive impacts to children, teachers and the classroom environment [3.3, 3.a].

Within Jamaican Primary Schools: In 2016, 15 technical staff from the Ministry of Education in Jamaica were trained by the Bangor-led Irie Classroom Team, to deliver a one-day teacher training workshop in appropriate behaviour management strategies and psychosocial skills from the Irie Classroom Toolbox [5.1]. Between 2016 and 2017, these technical staff trained all primary school teachers of grades 1, 2 and 3 across Jamaica (100% saturation) as an integral part of in-service teacher training at the national level. Approximately 5,100 primary school teachers were trained by 2017, with the Ministry for Education in Jamaica reporting ‘teachers are now equipped to utlize these strategies in their classroom…… to impact approximately one hundred and twenty thousand (120,000) 6 to 8 year-old children each school year ’ [5.1]. Hard copies of the Irie Classroom Toolbox teacher resources have been distributed to all primary schools across Jamaica to ensure teachers can fully utilise this training.

Within Jamaican Preschools : UNICEF Jamaica and the Early Childhood Commission in Jamaica have funded the upskilling of government staff to facilitate the national dissemination of the Irie Classroom Toolbox for early childhood practitioners [5.2, 5.3]. In July 2019, Professor Baker-Henningham and her team in the Caribbean Institute for Health Research trained 16 senior staff and 4 members of the executive from the Early Childhood Commission to deliver the programme. These staff subsequently trained over 110 teachers between 2019 and 2020 (one school year). In 2020, these staff trained 100% of the development officers and inspectors responsible for in-service teacher-training in Jamaica (over 100 persons). These training activities are designed to facilitate the integration of the Irie Classroom Toolbox into in-service teacher-training for all early childhood practitioners in Jamaica .

The Bangor-developed Irie Classroom Toolbox has now been adopted by the Jamaican government’s Early Childhood Commission as the national training programme to train all early childhood practitioners [5.4]. The Irie Classroom Toolbox is also included as an example of an effective teacher-training programme in positive discipline by the World Health Organisation [5.5]. Further impact of the development of this work is evidenced through the World’s Bank’s selection of Bangor’s Irie Homes Toolbox, a complementary violence prevention programme targeting parents of children aged two to six years, for virtual delivery across Jamaica in 2021 reaching over 3000 parents [5.6].

Bangor researchers demonstrated that group-based, early stimulation, parenting programmes are a cost-effective and scalable way of delivering interventions that have previously been implemented through individual home-based visits. Bangor’s group-based curriculum is one of the few evidence-based curricula available and the programme has now been adopted in Bangladesh, Colombia and the Middle East.

Since 2015, over 420 government health workers in Colombia and Bangladesh have been trained to conduct the group-based parenting programme. Over 4,000 mothers and children participated in the programme during the effectiveness trials. These trials showed that the programme significantly benefited participating mothers’ parenting practices and their children’s cognitive, language, and behavioural development [3.5, 3.6].

In Colombia, 99% of the 171 Familia, Mujer e Infancia mothers who were trained in the group-based parenting programme reported continued use of the curriculum after the end of the trial, thus benefiting over 3,000 more children and families since 2016. The group-based parenting curriculum has been adopted for use in Bangladesh for integration into the community clinic network that consists of 13,000 clinics that are established in all rural areas [5.7]. It has also been adopted by the Mayor of Bogota for use with vulnerable families with children under two years of age across the city and for use in Ecuador to be integrated into government services for young children and families at the national level. These initiatives are being supported by the Inter-American Development Bank [5.8].

More recently, Bangor has worked with the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a global NGO responding to the world’s worst humanitarian crises, to adapt the RUL group curriculum for use with refugee families across the Middle East. In August 2019, Baker-Henningham conducted a train-the-trainer workshop with 22 IRC staff from Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon to mobilise the programme to support families affected by conflict and disaster [5.9].