Increasing engagement with FDAC: An open call to develop light-touch interventions for families

05 November 2019

We are pleased to announce that we are looking for an organisation to help design ways to increase parental engagement in Family Drug and Alcohol Court (FDAC), as part of a new strand of the Supporting Families: Investing in Practice programme.

The recent review of the existing literature by CASCADE at Cardiff University suggests that parental engagement with the FDAC programme is important for successful outcomes and longer-term behaviour change.

We are therefore seeking to commission an organisation that specialises in developing programmes focused on behaviour change to develop a series of light-touch interventions to increase uptake of FDAC among families who are offered the service, and to increase engagement with the FDAC programme for families who ultimately choose to participate.

The application process
The successful organisation will be expected to develop interventions, and support their implementation in selected pilot local authorities.
If you would like to find out more about this opportunity and how to apply, please download the application form and submit your response by midnight on 2 December, 2019.

What is Supporting Families Investing in Practice?
The Supporting Families: Investing in Practice programme is working to scale up and evaluate three targeted projects with promising emerging evidence of impact: Family Group Conferencing (FGC), Family Drug and Alcohol Court (FDAC), and the Mockingbird Family Model. Following an open application process, 58 local authorities total were announced to participate in the programme.

What is the purpose of this piece of work?
This strand of work aims to help us understand whether any light-touch interventions can further improve outcomes for vulnerable families by increasing engagement with the FDAC service. Once interventions are developed, we will recruit an independent organisation (through our Panel of Evaluators), to test whether these interventions improve outcomes in practice with up to 15 sites.

This strand sits alongside a wider FDAC evaluation which involves 15 sites, comprised of 32 local authorities in total, which will either implement a new FDAC or expand their existing court services. This evaluation, conducted by NatCen, will explore the impact, implementation and process of these new and extended FDACs.

Download the application form