No one can do everything for a child, but every adult a child meets can contribute something. The Social Development Strategy describes what matters: children need opportunities to take part, the skills to make use of those opportunities, and recognition for their effort. This page shows what that looks like day to day and how a CTC community can build the strategy into its organisations.
Understand
Children take on the values of the people they feel attached to, because a child does not want to put a relationship with someone who matters to them at risk. Attachment cannot be ordered, but it grows reliably when three things come together. For it to turn into shared standards, adults say what matters to them and live by it.
For exampleEvery person is of equal worthTreat each other with respectHelp one anotherResolve conflicts without violenceHave a say and let other views countTake responsibilityWhat these values connect to
The child has a real task that makes a difference to others, and a say in matters that affect them. The task fits the child's age and maturity.
Common mistake: Opportunities do not mean that children decide everything. Adults set the frame and listen within it.
Before a child takes on a task, someone shows them how, breaks it into steps and practises with them. The child finds out that they can manage it.
Common mistake: A task without the skills to do it is not an opportunity but a trap. A child who fails because nobody showed them how will withdraw.
The feedback names what the child did, comes soon afterwards and is about the effort, not only the result. A greeting, a notice on the wall or a line in the newsletter to parents can also be recognition.
Common mistake: A general “well done” for everyone reaches no one. Recognition works when the individual child notices that it is meant for them.
Why this chain works and how it was researched: The Social Development Model →
The three ingredients are not tied to good intentions. Anyone who wants to win a child over gives them a task, teaches them how to do it and recognises them for it. Sports clubs and schools do this, and so does a peer group in which smoking or vaping is part of belonging.
StandardsShe takes on the club's rules: play fair, be on time, look out for the little ones.
StandardsShe takes on the group's rules: vaping is normal, and the adults do not need to know.
What matters, then, is who supplies the ingredients. The more adults in a community deliberately offer opportunities, skills and recognition, the more groups with healthy standards a child has to bond with.
The nine values here are examples, not a complete list. Some of them are not up for negotiation: dignity, equality and protection from discrimination apply to every child under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which every country in Europe has ratified, and they are among the values on which the European Union is founded (Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union and the Charter of Fundamental Rights). Which other values a community or an organisation puts at the centre is for it to decide. Schools and youth services already have the task of passing on values: the Convention sets out the aims of education in Article 29, and the Council of Europe's Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC) describes the values, attitudes and skills on which education for democracy builds.
The references are points of connection, not quotations: no article literally asks children to “help one another”, but each describes the aim the value serves.
The sort services by the risk of the group they address. The Social Development Strategy sits underneath them: it is promotion for all children, whatever their level of risk.
The strategy is therefore not a programme that replaces a tested and effective programme from an evidence register. The programmes target a community's priority risk factors; the strategy makes sure that everyday life between the programmes strengthens bonds as well. The action plan contains both, side by side.
Apply
The strategy needs no new service. It starts with what happens anyway: at lunch, over homework, when reading aloud. Choose a situation and see where the three ingredients fit in.
The children take turns laying the table, serve themselves and once a week help decide what is on the menu.
A practitioner shows them how to carry a bowl safely and judge a portion, and practises it with the newcomers before they do it on their own.
After the meal she says what she noticed: “You thought of everyone today, even Mila, who came late.”
Older children explain a task to younger ones that they can already do confidently themselves.
The club leader shows them how to explain without giving the answer away: ask a question, give a hint, wait.
She notes who helped whom and mentions it when she talks to the parents.
The children choose the spot that bothers them most and help plan who takes which stretch.
Beforehand they learn how to pick up and sort litter safely, and what to leave where it is.
The housing association puts up a photo with a thank-you in the stairwell, naming the children who took part.
The child fills in the form and chooses the first book themselves.
The librarian shows how to search the catalogue, borrow a book and renew the loan.
On the next visit she recognises the child and asks how the book was.
Playground helpers from the fourth year hand out the play equipment and lead a game for the younger children.
A teacher practises with them how to explain rules and how to settle a dispute before it grows.
At the school assembly the head introduces the playground helpers and says what went well in their week.
The child picks the book, turns the pages and tells how the story might go on.
The adults point to words and pictures, ask questions and let the child read single words.
They praise the child not for sitting still but for the idea: “I would never have thought of that.”
Not everything that looks like participation is participation. Roger Hart's ladder of participation distinguishes eight levels. The bottom three involve children in name only; real participation begins at the fourth. Choose a level to see what it means and what the next level up would look like.
Children and young people start a project and deliberately bring adults in to draw on their experience and influence. Decisions are made together.
Example
Young people want a football pitch in their neighbourhood, invite the local council and negotiate the location and the rules with it.
Children do not always have to work at the top of the ladder. Hart himself stresses that choice is what counts: an activity should allow each child the highest level that suits them at that moment.
Link to this levelChildren and young people have the idea and carry it out themselves. Adults support them without setting the direction.
Example
A group sets up a toy swap; the youth worker provides the room and helps when asked.
One step further
At level 8 the group would deliberately bring in adults, for instance to make the swap known across the whole neighbourhood, and decide together with them.
Adults bring in the idea; decisions are made together with the children and young people.
Example
The youth centre plans its summer programme in a group in which young people and staff have an equal say.
One step further
At level 7 the young people would propose programme items of their own and carry them out themselves, with staff in the background.
The project belongs to the adults, but the children are genuinely asked for their views, understand the process and learn what becomes of their answers.
Example
The school asks every class how the playground should be redesigned, and afterwards explains which suggestions will be carried out and why others will not.
One step further
At level 6 pupils would sit on the planning group and help decide on the redesign.
Adults assign the role. But the children know what it is about, who decided and why; they have a real task and take part voluntarily.
Example
Older children welcome the guests at the summer party and show them the way. They know why this matters and could have said no.
One step further
At level 5 the organisation would ask the children beforehand how the party should run, and afterwards show them which ideas were taken up.
Children appear to have a say but have no influence on the topic or the outcome. They have often been chosen by adults and speak for no one but themselves.
Example
Two selected children sit on the panel at a prevention conference and read out a welcome that adults have written for them.
One step further
At level 5 the children would first collect views in their classes, present them on the panel and later hear what came of them.
Children are there to add colour to an occasion: they sing, wear the T-shirts, stand in the photo. Nobody claims they helped to shape it, but nobody explains anything to them either.
Example
At the neighbourhood festival the children's group performs because it looks nice, and is then sent on its way.
One step further
At level 4 the group would have a real job at the festival, such as welcoming the guests, and would know why it is needed.
Children are used for adults' causes. They do not know what it is about and never learn what becomes of their contribution.
Example
The children paint posters for a fundraising campaign run by the organisation, without knowing what the money is for.
One step further
At level 4 the children would know what the campaign is for, who decided on it and why their posters are needed, and they would be free to say no.
Take an activity you do with children regularly and go through it ingredient by ingredient. At the end you get the completed activity planner as a PDF.
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Four questions, one minute. Asking them once a week soon shows which ingredient gets too little room in everyday practice.
Week 43
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Opportunities and recognition do not mean doing without rules. Children need adults who say what applies and stick to it. It works well to set a few concrete rules for each activity, mention them often and make sure they are kept.
What happens when a rule is broken is decided in advance and known to the child. That is the difference between a consequence and a punishment: the child can influence the outcome. And children need far more feedback than adults do, including when everything is going well.
Embed
The Social Development Strategy can be built into a CTC process from the start. It begins with the community board itself and, through the action plan, reaches the organisations in the community.
All members learn the three ingredients and write a personal plan for one child they meet regularly.
The reviews its members' personal plans and collects ideas for starting the work in the community. A work group takes responsibility for this and adds existing services that promote children's development to the resource assessment.
Early years settings, schools, clubs and other organisations commit in the action plan to using the strategy in their work. For each of them this starts the route in nine steps.
The strategy is quickly understood, and that is exactly why people underestimate what it takes to put it into practice. Implementation research shows that good training on its own changes little in behaviour. It works when five links hold together. If one is missing, the chain breaks.
All five links hold. This is how the strategy reaches everyday practice.
Once an organisation has committed in the action plan, a trainer accompanies it through nine steps, from the first contact to the annual review. Experience shows that three of the steps decide whether it succeeds.
The sessions are led by professionals who have attended a session themselves and completed trainer training. They run their first sessions together with an experienced trainer, then lead several sessions a year and take part in regular refresher meetings.
The strategy rests on the Social Development Model, one of the most thoroughly tested theories in prevention research. In the Seattle Social Development Project, teachers, parents and primary school children were trained according to this model; at age 21 the participants were doing markedly better at school or work and in their mental health than the , while the differences in crime and substance use were smaller. The study was controlled but not randomised.
For Communities That Care as a whole, the in 24 communities in the United States found less problem behaviour in the CTC communities. These findings apply to the system the strategy belongs to, not to the strategy alone. How much it contributes on its own has not been studied separately. The experience from Malmö also rests on an uncontrolled evaluation.
The idea behind the strategy comes from the Social Development Model by Hawkins and Catalano. This page and the worksheets were newly developed by the FINDER Akademie, prompted by the training materials that Birgitta Månsson and Sara Heide wrote for CTC in Sweden. Both sit on the board of Prevention Sverige (opens in a new window), the Swedish institute for applied prevention science.
Four templates for work in organisations, to print or as a PDF. The activity planner and the weekly log can also be filled in here on the page.
For an activity you do with children regularly: how do you involve them, what do they need to be able to do, and how do you recognise their effort?
Practitioners in early years, schools, clubs and youth work
Can also be filled in online
Records what the organisation wants to achieve, how the training will run and who follows up the work afterwards. The basis for steps 3 to 8.
Trainers and contact persons in organisations
Four questions for each week, ticked in a minute. After a few weeks it becomes clear which ingredient gets too little room in everyday practice.
Everyone who works with children regularly
Also available as an online weekly check
Four cards per sheet, the recipe on the front, the weekly check on the back. Print double-sided and cut at the marks.
For training sessions and staff badge holders
The complete training materials, including the trainer manual, presentations and posters, are given to participants in the training. Ask about training in your country
More questions about CTC are answered on the page with all questions.
No. The strategy is a way of working with a simple pattern that adults build into what they already do: involve children, equip them with the skills they need and recognise their effort. It has no fixed manual, no set number of sessions and no target group of its own, which is also why evidence registers do not list it.
In the CTC process it complements the programmes a community selects for its priority . The programmes work on specific targets; the strategy makes sure that everyday life in early years settings, schools, clubs and neighbourhoods pulls in the same direction. The action plan contains both.
For every age. The three ingredients apply to the four-year-old who helps to lay the table just as much as to the teenager who coaches younger children at a sports club. What changes with age is the form: how much say a child can handle, which skills they still need to learn and what kind of recognition they experience as genuine.
Training is therefore usually adapted separately for early years settings and for schools. The ladder of participation helps to judge which level of involvement suits an age group.
The sessions are led by professionals who have been trained themselves and have completed trainer training. They run their first sessions together with an experienced trainer, then train regularly and attend refresher meetings, so that the quality is the same across organisations.
Above all, an organisation needs a contact person with the backing of management. With this person the trainer uses the introduction plan to agree who takes part, how the work connects to existing routines and who follows it up. A session usually takes two and a half to three hours; the short version about 45 minutes.
In the short term, by looking at implementation: are organisations planning their activities with the three ingredients, are staff keeping the weekly log, do the organisations report in the annual review? The can answer these questions itself.
In the long term, the CTC shows it. Among other things it records whether young people experience opportunities for involvement, and recognition for it, in their families and at school. These are exactly the the strategy sets out to strengthen. Changes show up across several surveys, not after one year.
Why bonding works: the chain from the three conditions to behaviour, after Hawkins and Catalano.
Experience from a Swedish city where more than 3,000 adults were trained, and what came of it.
Roles, steps and milestones from the first conversation to the action plan.
The US register of tested programmes for children and young people, run by the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. It certifies on three tiers. Promising asks for one randomised controlled trial or two quasi-experimental evaluations, with a consistent positive effect and no evidence of harm. Model adds a second high-quality trial and at least one follow-up twelve months or more after the intervention ends. Model Plus adds a replication carried out by researchers from outside the developer’s team. These are the standards of evidence the CTC European Network review applied when it assessed European programmes for Xchange.
An observational design: a group is followed over time and then distinguished by whether it received the programme or not; nobody is assigned. A prospective cohort starts observation in the present and runs into the future, a retrospective one works through a course of events that has already finished. Because the groups can differ from the outset, the risk of hidden confounders stays higher than in a randomised trial.
The working body of a CTC process: practitioners who run schools, youth centres, family services and clubs, together with residents and, ideally, young people themselves. The board reads the community profile, sets priorities and chooses the programmes. It is distinct from the key-leader group, which provides the mandate and the resources. Called Gebietsteam in Germany and community board in the US.
The social-work tradition of enabling residents and local institutions to identify and act on their own needs, rather than having services delivered to them. CTC’s authors place the approach explicitly in this tradition: the community collects its own data, sets its own priorities and owns its own plan. Known as Gemeinwesenarbeit in German-speaking countries.
The randomised controlled trial that established the evidence for CTC. Begun in 2003, it matched 24 small towns in seven US states in pairs and randomly assigned one of each pair to CTC, following more than 4,400 young people from age ten into adulthood. Young people in CTC towns started using substances later, showed less delinquency and violence, and the differences persisted to age 21.
How certain a statement about an effect is, not how large the effect turns out to be. GRADE describes this as the confidence in an estimate of an effect and grades it by how likely further research is to change that confidence. The Green List Prevention judges conclusiveness separately from the study design and makes it depend on group sizes, the number of studies and the presence of findings from the German language area.
The group that does not receive the programme and so shows how the participants would probably have developed without it. That yardstick can never be observed, only estimated; the effect is the difference between what happened and what would have happened without the measure. Without a comparison group it stays open whether a change is down to the programme or to maturation, prior experience and concurrent influences.
Four levels instead of the split between effective and ineffective: a programme is at first merely described, then theoretically grounded, then supported by first indications from practice, and finally by causal evidence. The lower the level, the more freely the evaluation design can be chosen; for a causal statement only designs that allow one come into question. The rating scheme of the Green List Prevention follows this model.
A measure of how large a difference is, independent of the size of the sample. The usual one in prevention is Cohen’s d: the difference between the means, divided by the spread. Unlike a p-value, an effect size says something about the extent of an effect and makes studies comparable with one another; the Green List Prevention therefore asks for it in studies with a control group.
A repeat measurement taken after a programme has ended. It shows whether an effect lasts or was only visible while the measure was running. The standards of the Society for Prevention Research ask for at least one long-term measurement at a reasonable distance from the end of the intervention and treat six months as the sensible minimum; the Green List Prevention uses the same interval and expects at least one positive effect to persist by then.
The online register of effectiveness-tested prevention programmes maintained by the Crime Prevention Council of Lower Saxony (Landespräventionsrat Niedersachsen), with the risk and protective factors each programme addresses. German CTC communities choose tested programmes from it in phase four. The register is in German only.
The people in a community who control budgets, shape policy and can commit their organisation: the mayor or head of the local authority, the police chief, the head of the school administration, and leaders from health, business, faith communities and the media. They give the CTC process its mandate and its resources, they recruit the community board and hold it and the coordinator to account, and they keep the work in place beyond a funding round. The division of labour is the point: the community board does the analysis, the priority setting and the planning, the key leaders make that work possible and act on what it recommends.
A programme is manualised when a written guideline for action settles what happens when and with whom; only that makes it repeatable elsewhere and testable at all. How closely the guideline is followed is part of what decides success: a review of almost 500 studies found effects at least two to three times as large where implementation was careful. The Green List Prevention therefore asks for available manuals, training and instruments of quality control.
The statistical combination of the results of several studies of the same question into one pooled estimate; Gene Glass introduced the term in 1976 for the analysis of a large collection of results from individual studies. Each study is weighted, as a rule by how precisely it measured, and the result is reported with a confidence interval and with a measure of how far the studies disagree with one another. A meta-analysis cannot repair the studies it pools: where the primary evidence is thin, one-sided or drawn from a different setting, the pooled figure inherits all of that.
The geographical unit a CTC process works in. Not an administrative boundary but the area whose residents share schools, services and daily life, and whose practitioners know each other. Choosing it well matters: the youth survey area and the action area must coincide, or the coalition ends up acting on a profile the area does not recognise. Called Sozialraum in German.
An approach that treats adolescence as a period of growth to be supported rather than a set of problems to be prevented, and that works on competence, confidence, connection, character and contribution. It shares its theoretical roots with CTC in the Social Development Model, and CTC’s emphasis on protective factors is where the two meet.
The share of a population that shows a characteristic at one point in time or within a given period, for instance the proportion of fifteen-year-olds who drank alcohol in the past thirty days. Prevalence counts the cases that exist, so it depends both on how many new cases arise and on how long each one lasts; incidence counts only the new cases in a period. A measure that shortens an episode lowers prevalence without changing incidence, which is why prevention studies report the two separately.
A classification by target group, not by timing. Universal offers address a whole population without any individual risk having been established; selective ones address subgroups whose risk is markedly above average; indicated ones address individual young people showing first signs that do not yet warrant a diagnosis. CTC works universally and selectively.
A classification by the point at which one intervenes. Primary prevention starts before a disorder appears and lowers the number of new cases; secondary prevention shortens courses that have already begun, through early detection and treatment; tertiary prevention reduces the impairment a disorder leaves behind. Only primary and secondary prevention programmes enter the Green List Prevention, because that matches the direction of CTC.
Conditions that lower the likelihood of problem behaviour and promote healthy development: strong bonds to family, school and community, clear standards, opportunities to contribute, the skills to use them, and recognition for doing so. In the Social Development Model they are what bonding is made of. Strengthening protection counts as much in CTC as reducing risk.
A design with a comparison group but without random assignment: who receives the programme follows from practice. In the field this is often the only workable option, but it calls for extra precautions such as several points of measurement, statistical control or a stepped roll-out, because the programme and comparison groups can differ systematically.
A study in which participants are assigned to the programme or to the comparison condition at random. Because chance makes the groups comparable on average, a difference at the end is more readily attributed to the programme than to pre-existing differences. The standards of the Society for Prevention Research ask, for a statement of efficacy, for at least two methodologically rigorous studies with consistently positive findings and at least one significant long-term measurement.
Conditions in a young person’s family, school, peer group or neighbourhood that raise the likelihood of problem behaviour such as substance use, violence, offending or leaving school early. Many act on several outcomes at once. CTC measures them locally through the youth survey and asks the community to prioritise the ones that are most elevated.
Aaron Antonovsky’s question of what keeps people healthy, as opposed to what makes them ill. Its central idea, a sense of coherence built from comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness, corresponds closely to the protective factors CTC works with. The term is widely used in European health promotion and less so in the US prevention literature.
A finding is called significant when the data would be sufficiently unlikely on the assumption that there is no difference; the usual threshold is five per cent. The American Statistical Association notes that a p-value measures neither the size of an effect nor the importance of a result, and that scientific or policy conclusions should not depend on whether it falls below a threshold.
A written-out assumption about how a programme works: which steps lead from the measure through intermediate outcomes to the intended goal, and which conditions have to hold along the way. It is developed before implementation together with those involved, and it settles what will later be measured. In the Green List Prevention a theory of change study counts as an evaluation level of one star: it tests the assumed chain of effects, not the effect against a control group.
The question whether a programme developed elsewhere also works here. There is a tension between fidelity and fit: a rigid adoption misses the target group, a free adaptation can remove the very ingredients that worked, and the balance can only be struck deliberately and on the record. The Green List Prevention grades transferability by the number of studies from the German language area, in four steps from given to unclear.
The standardised, anonymous questionnaire that a CTC community puts to school pupils, as a rule between the ages of eleven and seventeen, to measure the risk and protective factors in its own neighbourhoods. Answers are reported for an area or a year group, never for an individual or a class, and the profile they produce is what phase three turns into a short list of priorities. National adaptations translate the scales, drop items that do not apply and re-test them: the German version was confirmed as largely one-dimensional and valid against reported violence, delinquency, substance use and depressive symptoms.