ABOUT THE BRANDON CENTRE

RESEARCH

The Centre has received substantial funding to carry out the first UK randomised controlled trial of Multisystemic therapy (MST).

The main objective of MST is to prevent re-offending by persistent young offenders. MST is totally delivered in the community and involves tackling the underlying causes of persistent offending behaviour by working with the young person and her/his parent or carer.

MST has been evaluated in several randomised controlled trials run by the team of psychologists and social workers from the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in the USA that developed MST in the 1980s. The benefits of MST in comparison with other treatment and control conditions have been evident on measures of adolescent and parental psychological disorders, family relations and functioning, re-engagement in education, substance misuse, re-arrest rates, severity of offences and re-imprisonment. However, when the intervention was tested in a Canadian randomised controlled trial, outcomes were less conclusive.

The central objective of the Brandon Centre trial is to test the effectiveness of MST in preventing re-offending by persistent young offenders. Up to 220 persistent young offenders aged 13-16 are being recruited. They are being randomly allocated either to a group receiving MST with youth offending services as usual or to a group receiving youth offending services without MST.

Young people will be followed for up to three years after the study (i.e., MST and non-MST participants) to see whether they broke the law and how often this occurred. The trial is being run in partnership with Haringey Youth Offending Service (YOS) and Camden YOS, both of which have agreed to make referrals to the study. The Youth Justice Board (YJB) has given its full support for the study. The Sub-Department of Clinical Psychology, University College London, is managing the evaluation.

An Expert Advisory Group has been formed, which meets three times a year to review how the research is progressing, to solve any problems that come up and to make sure that MST is being properly given to the young person and her/his parent or carer. The members of the Expert Advisory Group include representatives from the Department of Health, the YJB, Child and Adolescent Forensic Psychiatry, University College London, Haringey YOS, Camden YOS and the Brandon Centre Council of Management. A team of three therapists and a supervisor has been trained to give MST correctly by the people who developed the therapy (i.e. MST Services).