Hello to All,
At our recent PB Trainer meetings we have started a conversation about the Evidence Base for PBs. This has always been an area of “weakness” for PBs – we all know there is a mass of anecdotal evidence of its effectiveness yet no one has done/been able to do a rigorous evaluation of PBs.
Given “proper” evaluation is so difficult and expensive to do we agreed in our discussions that it makes more sense for us to look to the evidence base of other similar models/programmes. I have started to look into this as has Terri from Safety-Net in Brighton.
However, in order to find the most relevant evidence from elsewhere, we first need to be able to give clear answers to the questions:
What does PBs do?
What impact does PBs have? (ie what change or difference does PBs bring about)?
I am finding it difficult to answer these questions myself; I often describe PBs thus… ”it is a powerful, easy-to-use “toolkit” that promotes safeguarding, develops personal resilience and emotional safety.”
In thinking about what PBs does I have come up with the following list (which does not itself feel exhaustive):
- Develops Emotional Literacy (Illiteracy)
- Teaches safety skills
- Develops awareness of self/other
- Encourages/enables Personal Development
- Builds resilience/well-being
- Develops Response-Ability
- Develops Relationship Skills
- Enables us to bridge internal & external world; personal & social
- Creates both Protective and Connective culture
- Promotes Safeguarding
- Enables us to have adventures and RoP
There is a lot here and I feel this makes it all the harder to communicate clearly and create shared meaning in our efforts to take PBs to a wider audience.
So in the hope of generating some useful discussion to move us forward with developing a credible and effective evidence base for PBs I would really appreciate hearing how any of you would answer these questions.
In anticipation
Lucy
