Summary of the impact

From 2004, researchers at the university's Centre for Research in Primary and Community Care developed the `Tool to Measure Parenting Self-Efficacy' (TOPSE). This allowed community-based parenting support practitioners to evaluate and demonstrate, for the first time, the effectiveness of their services and providing, for example, quantifiable data to their funders. Parents too could rate the help they received, as well as their own efficacy as parents, and they subsequently reported increased confidence in their parenting ability and improved parent-child relationships. By 2008 the tool had spread nationally and internationally, and has since been used by more than 300 practitioners and researchers worldwide.