Jane Lewis

We need to make much more use of the existing international knowledge base in the design and delivery of services. Not all ideas are good ideas, and services that are well grounded in theory and research have been shown to be more effective than those based only on insights from practice.

Knowing the research, and knowing your approach is evidence-based, is key to being able to make sound, decisive and timely judgements - and to being a confident profession.

But evidence doesn’t speak for itself. The evidence base is usually imperfect – there are gaps, contingencies and questions about transferability. The richest understanding, and the creation of new knowledge, happens when practitioners come together to interrogate and make sense of research.

Organisations and people learn powerfully from their direct engagement in evaluation and research and need to develop their own evidence as well as drawing on the wider body of research.
We need to focus more on implementation. It is easy for an evidence-based model to lose its effectiveness when it's adapted to a new setting or delivered on a larger scale, or to exist as a 'boutique' service reaching only small numbers of children and families. We need to make better use of the developing science of implementation and to contribute to it by building a body of knowledge which is based on the UK experience.