Do short term interventions work?
By Richard Kizis - Added 21st of December 2008Do short term interventions work with Children who have high levels of behavioural problems?
My research so far is on a very small scale, mainly contained at one school although I would delight in the opportunity to widen my research to other schools and county’s. However, I have worked in lots of schools with similar problems and back grounds, this experience as enabled me to understand that majority of schools share common problems. The priority being does ‘short term intervention have any impact on children with high level of behavioural problems in schools’ and if not why do we continue doing them? I researched this area using the ‘blot on-tracking-system’ which I personally developed to aid my work with children who display challenging behaviour.
The system collates information provided by the teacher and works out the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ entries over a four week period. I began tracking a number of children already undergoing short term interventions from several different agencies for periods of 6 weeks or longer. To my surprise all these children had a rise in ‘negative behaviour’ during the intervention period and continued to maintain the higher level of behaviour showing no signs of improvements while receiving interventions from multiply agencies, these statistics are alarming when you consider the cost of all these interventions. These children need the intensive support that main stream school can’t supply on there own, one session a week of 30-40 minutes is not enough for these children. I track children very closely monitoring all the support they have received and what is in place up to the present day, several children can have between 4 to 9 different agencies/interventions working with an individual child at one time - but still show no sign of improvement in their behaviour.
A better working practise for these nine agencies involved, would be to have a designated worker from each agencies permanently in nine schools for longer periods of time, because to observe behaviour accurately you need to be able to see children in different situations; classroom-playground-different subjects-dinnertimes. Enabling the designated worker to deal with a situation directly, a relationship/trust/respect could be formed with these children; promoting long term intensive support has a better outcome for these children in main stream school. A necessity to move forward, a time to change procedures when a system is not working, not continuing just because that’s what has always done.