FHille

Summary

Introduction

The FHille programme is aimed at children aged four to six and families who are expected to benefit from additional support for the child’s school readiness. The programme provides families with tools for developing the child’s prerequisites for learning. The aim of the programme is to promote children’s wellbeing, development and prerequisites for learning through play and activities, interaction and reflection. The FHille programme aims to promote the child’s school readiness in the long term. The programme seeks to engage the parent’s participation in the way their child thinks and learns.

Research question

Does the FHille programme have evidence-based effectiveness in the Finnish context on strengthening the child’s self-esteem and social, cognitive and motor skills, or strengthening the child’s emotional and interpersonal skills? Secondly, does the FHille programme have evidence-based effectiveness with regard to engaging the parent’s active participation or the parent’s experience of being an important resource for the child?

Data and programmes

This study used the Population, Concept and Context (PCC) strategy to search for literature, which is a typical strategy in exploratory literature reviews. The search targeted the following question: What research has been done on the FHille programme?  The keywords used were: P = parents and young children, C = FHille. Context was omitted to avoid an excessive restriction of the results of the search. The primary area of interest in the search was effectiveness studies carried out on the method, although studies carried out by using different frameworks were also included. A systematic search was carried out for the following six databases: MEDLINE, APA PsycInfo, CINAHL, ERIC, Web of Science and Scopus. In addition, a search for publications in Finnish was performed via the Finna.fi service.

Results

The FHille programme is primarily well-documented, and its mechanisms of action are based on one or more generally accepted theories or models that explain human behaviour or action. Implementation support for the FHille programme is realised for over half of the required items, i.e. the level of implementation support is satisfactory. No peer-reviewed studies were found on the programme in the literature search.

Method assessment

FHille is a well-documented method that has a theoretical foundation. It receives a method assessment of 1/5. There is no evidence of the effectiveness of the FHille programme, i.e. there is no data on the effectiveness of the method at this time.