Domestic Abuse, Recovering Together (DART™) helps children and mothers get back on track after experiencing domestic abuse. We’ve evaluated DART and found that it was effective.
So that we can reach and help more children and families, we’re now scaling up our successful services. As part of this, we train practitioners from other organisations to deliver our programmes.
DART is the first service we’ve scaled up. So, to help us understand what works when scaling up a service, we carried out an implementation evaluation.
We’ll be using what we’ve learnt to improve the way we scale up other services in the future.
This report is part of our impact and evidence series.
Author: Isabella Stokes
Published: 2017
Professionals thought the programme was important because it focuses on the relationship between the mother and her child, instead of working with them both in isolation.
After the training, professionals were enthusiastic about DART and said they felt confident about delivering the programme.
Although eight organisations had been trained, only two were actively delivering DART by April 2017. However, since our data was collected eight organisations have started delivering DART and more have expressed an interest in taking it on.
Professionals reported barriers to running the programme, many of which they did not foresee. These included problems with funding, staffing, transport, venues and issues with taking children out of school.
Based on our findings, we’ve made improvements to the way we scale-up DART:
Please cite as: Stokes, I. (2017) Implementation evaluation of Domestic Abuse, Recovering Together (DART) scale-up: impact and evidence briefing. London: NSPCC.
Read our information on what domestic abuse is, how to recognise it and how people who work with children can respond to it.
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