Disruptive adolescents in the school system: comparative effectiveness of helping strategies

Large sums of money are often spent on setting up different systems of helping or managing disruptive adolescents in the school system, without reference to objective data on effectiveness. This paper considers 24 alternative systems, scrutinizes the evaluation research on each, and notes that the most expensive systems are not necessarily the most effective. Furthermore, the task of resolving behavioural difficulties may be either under- or over-resourced in individual cases, building in either failure or waste. A guide is given to developing a sequence of intervention strategies of known cost-effectiveness, providing a fail-safe structure for helping disruptive adolescents in educational settings.