youngballymun presentation to
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children
youngballymun welcomes this opportunity to speak to the Committee on the theme of Childhood
Poverty and on the youngballymun area-based strategy to tackle child poverty. This is an important
opportunity to provide detail on the features of our model of work and early indications of the
outcomes being achieved by practitioners and children in Ballymun.
Background
Firstly, to provide some context and rationale around the imperative to implement comprehensive,
area-wide, evidence-based approaches to tackling poverty:
 Social exclusion, poverty and intergenerational deprivation have major impacts on life outcomes
– social determinants at birth including parents’ education, health and housing status are
significantly correlated with children’s educational attainment, health including mental health,
employment chances and other significant life outcomes.
 High concentrations of need at area level impose significant burdens on children and families,
on services, communities and the State.
 A cycle of disadvantage is replicated, in part, because we are not investing in the right types of
evidence-based supports to families to build protective factors and skills early enough in life and
with sufficient consistency.
 Disadvantage is heavily concentrated in certain geographical areas and family level disadvantage
is compounded by ‘neighbourhood effects’ – area-based approaches are critical to addressing
this. Structural cause and effect mechanisms of poverty can be impacted on through wholecommunity integrated service strategies.
 We know what can work to counteract social determinants at birth, and with an integrated
service plan, appropriate capacity-building, sufficient motivation and focus, we can measurably
improve life outcomes for children living in areas of social disadvantage and risk of poverty.
youngballymun model
youngballymun is a model for an area-based approach to tackling poverty.
 youngballymun, along with our colleagues in Tallaght and Darndale, was established as a
Prevention and Early Intervention Programme in 2007. Jointly funded by Atlantic Philanthropies
and the then Office of the Minister for Children, we were tasked with designing and
implementing a ten-year strategy to improve outcomes for children and families in Ballymun.
 In order to ensure that a comprehensive lens was brought to planning the youngballymun
initiative, we paid particular attention to the service design phase of the work. Partners from
across the education, health and community sectors, as well as local parents and residents,
were brought together to strategically map out the needs of the area and appropriate evidencebased responses. Our service design phase involved in depth needs analysis, across different
ages and stages of development, the investigation of service strategies that had been proven to
work in other contexts and in-depth reflection by local service providers on their roles in
delivering measurably improved wellbeing and learning outcomes for children and families. The
design phase resulted in the development of a comprehensive area-based service plan,
comprising four interconnected programmes of work:
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Infant Mental Health – activating the resources of parents in fostering healthy infant
development through interventions by public health nurses, speech and language
therapists and community practitioners
Quality Early Years Practice – developing capacity of early years services in Ballymun to
implement the Síolta quality framework and the High Scope curriculum
Social and Emotional Development, Literacy and Language – interconnected
programmes and initiatives to build capacity of parents, children and teachers to foster
social and emotional development and language and literacy skills
Youth Mental Health – reengineering and building the capacity of youth and health
services to actively promote and respond to young people’s mental health.
There are a number of core features of the youngballymun model:
▫ Firstly, the life cycle response is fundamental. We need to start from pregnancy and
birth to build protective factors and set the right foundation. From this solid start, we
continue to implement rigorous supports consistently in a child’s journey through life.
The evidence to support this life cycle response is compelling.
▫ Evidence-based approaches are at the heart of everything that we do – all the initiatives
we implement have a strong basis in evidence and ongoing analysis of child and family
outcomes is central. We must all invest in what we know will work.
▫ Changing outcomes for children means building capacity of those they interact with to
foster and nurture their growth and development in a conscious and informed way.
This means parents, service providers and the wider community. Capacity building is
the development of specific skills and competence in order to implement evidencebased practice and to work collaboratively.
▫ The practice changes that youngballymun promotes are taking place within existing
systems – health services, schools, pre schools, community groups. The embedding of
practice in mainstream services allows universal reach to a whole community of children
and also for the practice to be sustainable.
▫ The youngballymun model is designed to be replicated. The approaches we promote
can be scaled-up in other communities who are interested in this way of working and
we hope to be in a position to actively support this process.
▫ Services are only cost effective when they actually deliver results. All of our work has a
keen eye to efficiency and effectiveness. We are committed to delivering results and
demonstrating return on investment. A value for money study forecasts a €4.50 return
to the State for every €1 invested in youngballymun.
Outcomes and next steps
 Outcomes to date from practice in Ballymun are encouraging. Some examples of success to
date include
▫ A 70% uptake of the Parent-Child Psychological Support Programme, an evidenced
programme delivered in partnership with public health nurses and speech and language
therapists. Early indications suggest that the proportion of babies demonstrating secure
attachment is greater than that of typical population samples.
▫ Measurable improvements have been achieved in the quality of Early Years service
provision.
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Children who have participated in a social and emotional classroom curriculum
(Incredible Years) have shown reduced hyperactivity, conduct and peer problems and
increased pro social behaviour.
▫ In parallel, participants in the Incredible Years parenting programmes exhibit
significantly lower levels of stress and depression following the programme and this is
largely sustained at the six month follow-up point.
▫ Increased time is being spent on literacy in schools and pupils’ literacy scores have
improved – across the primary school community, reduced numbers of children are in
the lower percentiles and first class children in Ballymun are now achieving reading
scores above national averages.
The Programme for Government acknowledges the importance of drawing on a strong evidence
base and reconfiguring existing services to fundamentally reform our approach to child poverty.
This is reiterated by the 2013 Budget commitment to an Area-based Approach to Tackling Child
Poverty. youngballymun is an active working model of how an area-based strategy to tackle
child poverty is delivering real results for children in the real-world context of Ballymun.
The establishment of the Children and Family Support Agency, new service commissioning
strategies across the HSE, the priority given to evidence, the development of family support
service pathways nationally and a renewed policy focus on supporting parents provide
important opportunities for policy and practice integration locally
We look forward to working with the Department of Children, the CFSA, primary care and other
partners in developing practice and sharing learning.