The effectiveness of Chance UK's mentoring programme in improving behavioural and emotional outcomes in primary school children with behavioural difficulties: study protocol for a randomised controlled trial

Laura Whybra, Georgina Warner, Gretchen Bjornstad, Tim Hobbs, Lucy Brook, Zoe Wrigley, Vashti Berry, Obioha Ukoumunne, Justin Matthews, Rod Taylor, Tim Eames, Angeliki Kallitsoglou, Sarah Blower, Nick Axford

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Abstract

Background
There is a need to build the evidence base of early interventions to promote children’s health and development in the UK. Chance UK is a voluntary sector organisation based in London that delivers a 12-month mentoring programme for primary school children identified by teachers and parents as having behavioural and emotional difficulties. The aim of the study is to determine the effectiveness of the programme in terms of children’s behaviour and emotional well-being; this is the primary outcome of the trial.

Methods/Design
A randomised controlled trial will be conducted in which participants are randomly allocated on a dynamic basis to one of two possible arms: the intervention arm (n = 123) will be offered the mentoring programme, and the control arm (n = 123) will be offered services as usual. Outcome data will be collected at three points: pre-intervention (baseline), mid-way through the mentoring year (c.9 months after randomisation) and post- mentoring programme (c.16 months after randomisation).

Discussion
This study will further enhance the evidence for early intervention mentoring programmes for child behaviour and emotional well-being in the UK.


© 2018 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Original languageEnglish
JournalBMC Psychology
Volume6
Issue number9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 12 Mar 2018

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