The AcCESs Evidence project was delivered by CES from 2015 – 2022 to provide practitioners who work with children, families and communities with access to up-to-date evidence to support their work in areas which are particularly important to improving outcomes for children and young people.
The aim of the project was to develop a series of evidence reviews that would contribute to the creation of a common understanding and a common language for practitioners be they in health, social services or education.
Evidence reviews were produced on:
You can find the resources here.
We know from our experience working with front line practitioners (e.g. teachers, social workers, youth workers, health workers) that they encounter barriers accessing and using relevant evidence in their work. Aside from the real challenge of finding the time to do this work they identified other barriers such as the:
The project aimed to address these challenges by summarising and translating evidence on a number of key topics to enable practitioners to apply this in their everyday practice.
The CES project team adopted a consultative approach to this work to ensure that it was relevant and useable for the target audiences.
We began by consulting with two international intermediary organisations to seek their views and experience in developing materials for practitioners. We engaged with key organisations in the children’s sector to gain a view of children’s lives and the current issues that are of significance to them.
We surveyed practitioners working in the child and family, health and youth work sectors to identify topics of most usefulness to them, the common ways in which they access evidence in support of their work, and the best formats to communicate the evidence to them.
Then we compiled an initial draft of subject areas based on the strength of their existing research base and their topicality in current policy and practice.
We consulted with our various audiences through the CES website to help in the selection of topics and established an advisory group of researchers and practitioners to support the work.
The final topics agreed were:
Resources were then co-produced with frontline practitioners, who were involved in both the design and the production phases.
The AcCESs Evidence resources include key messages from research, data, practice wisdom and tools which are relevant for practice.
We disseminated the evidence reviews to the audiences in a number of formats including written documents, video, animation, infographics, and webinars.
All the resources are available on the CES online repository here.
To speak to our team about this work contact us here
All the resources are available on the CES online repository here.
