Your Choice CBT

Your Choice (YC) provides training for youth practitioners in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) techniques, who then aim to provide regular sessions with 11 to 17-year-olds assessed as having a medium or high risk of harm or vulnerability as a result of extra-familial harm.

Developed by the London Innovation and Improvement Alliance, and supported by the London Violence Reduction Unit (VRU), youth practitioners aim to build trusting and relationships with young people, using CBT techniques to support and empower them to disrupt unwanted patterns of behaviour.  

The Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) and the Home Office funded a pilot study of Your Choice, which began in July 2022.

Employing a robust Clustered Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) design, the evaluation assesses the feasibility of effective data collection, examine the implementation of YC, assess the adherence of local authorities (LAs) and youth practitioners to randomisation, and pilot study outcomes and evaluation methods.  

Data collection in the pilot study has proved challenging and the recruitment of young people being slower than anticipated. Overall, the training was successfully delivered to treatment teams, and eligibility criteria for the young people met.   

Qualitative evidence found support for the logic model. Moreover, analysis of the baseline data offers good support that some of the key measures collected are of high value.   

Implementation was facilitated by practitioners’ understanding of and commitment to YC, the funding provided for delivery, the flexibility of the programme that enabled the use of creative and engaging sessions and the monthly supervision provided by a clinical lead.  

Implementation concerns included the lower-than-anticipated frequency of meetings. While session data is incomplete, where it was collected, the young people completed fewer sessions than expected at this stage.  

The additional workload associated with data collection also hindered implementation, particularly the requirement for consent forms at the recruitment stage and session forms after meetings.  

The extent to which practitioners followed the protocol for assigning young people to teams was mixed. There was some evidence that some children were allocated to YC based on their greater needs – which would introduce systematic bias.  

YEF is proceeding to fund an efficacy trial of Your Choice.

This trial will seek to implement the range of recommendations suggested by the evaluator to improve the quality of the evaluation.