Resilient Families Plus: Evaluation Report and Executive Summary

Resilient Families Plus is a 10-week school-based family intervention designed for students in their initial high school years and their parents. The program aims to bolster family relations since the premise of the program is that positive family environments are associated with better social and learning outcomes (Shortt et al., 2007; Toumbourou, et al., 2013). Resilient Families Plus has been newly created from the original and established program called Resilient Families developed by Professor Toumbourou and colleagues at the Centre for Adolescent Health in conjunction with Deakin University (‘program developers’). Resilient Families Plus is a new prevention program with a family home reading component and is an extension from the previous Resilient Families program. Resilient Families Plus comprises the same five core elements of the original Resilient Families program but with two extra components which focus on academic and learning outcomes in addition to the health and well-being outcomes central to the original program. Academic and learning outcomes become a new focus through the introduction of the Parent committee training session and distribution of a parent reading campaign brochure designed to encourage adolescents to read an extra 10 minutes per day. The Resilient Families Plus pilot was conducted in Terms 2 and 4 in 2018 with Year 8 students and their parents from two Victorian secondary schools. These two schools had a high percentage of students from disadvantaged backgrounds (both schools had more than 50% students in the bottom quartile on the ICSEA1 measure). The aim of the evaluation was to examine the feasibility of the Resilient Families Plus intervention and its readiness for trial, and to explore whether the program had an influence on academic achievement precursors such as academic self-concept (Mathematics Self-Concept and English Self-Concept) and academic resilience. The original protocol of this evaluation included a comparison of two intervention groups (Resilient Families and Resilient Families Plus) and a control group. However, low recruitment (two schools and 34 students) resulted in the need to amend the evaluation design to a smaller scale study of one intervention group (Resilient Families Plus) reducing the potential for robust estimates of impact. Accompanying this impact study was an implementation and process evaluation and cost calculation of the Resilient Families Plus program. The evaluation of Resilient Families Plus was independently conducted by Western Sydney University between July 2017 and March 2019. The program delivery was co-funded by VicHealth and Evidence for Learning, and the evaluation was funded by Evidence for Learning.