HALE develops and provides programmes and projects designed to assist children and adults at risk of harm in regions and countries. These include programmes aimed at preventing harm and promoting health and well-being, as well as evaluated interventions tailored to meeting the specific requirements of vulnerable groups and disadvantaged communities.

Our special focus is on advancing improved understandings and strategies for risk behaviours and risk taking for children and adults in a range of health settings, such as schools and colleges, health facilities, and community organisations. Better health, educational and welfare outcomes can be achieved by promoting health and welfare and reducing adverse risk taking.

We work with a wide range of groups at risk, including children in institutions, teenagers with eating disorders, people with mental health problems and learning disabilities, offenders, and children and adults in the sex industry, transferring lessons about what works between different health settings, and within and between different countries.

We have fashioned innovative ways of working with these risk groups.

For example, in respect of children and adolescents, we have developed a more child-focused, holistic and cross-sectoral approach, which offers a fresh way of addressing risk taking and risk behaviours of children and adolescents.

This is based on our Risk, Resilience and Vulnerability Model, a valuable resource for fashioning creative approaches for reducing harm and promoting health. It is a different, and more empowering, way of thinking and working with a child-centred, developmental perspective that brings together diverse agendas including: health education and health promotion for children and young people; child protection and safeguarding; and risk assessment and risk management.

This applies across settings, whether it be early years, pre-school, school, post-school and so on. Included in this are children and young people in a range of institutions, including the different forms of street shelters, children’s homes, residential and penal institutions to be found. It also embraces children in family, foster care and adoption settings. The approach, among other things, stops us attempting to simply slot children and adolescents into pre-existing services and programmes.

Specific examples of our programmes and projects can be found in the accompanying sections on our international work and on our work based in the UK.

More information on our approaches, such as the Risk, Resilience and Vulnerability Model, can be found in our research and evidence-based publications. These are listed in the Publications section of this website.