The Community Resources and Opportunities for Students (CROPS) model for Student Care Centres (SCC) Is a service delivery framework envisioned to enhance SCC’s capacity to holistically serve the developmental needs, increase resiliency and develop the potential of students from lower income, at-risk and dysfunctional families in the community. The study sought to understand the effectiveness of CROPS and how it has improved the outcomes of at-risk children.

Both quantitative and qualitative findings suggest that CROPS has positively impacted the children, SCC staff and parents. Overall, students who received CROPs-based intervention made significant improvement as compared to their counterparts in the comparison groups, in 43 outcome indicators measured, after intervention. Qualitative data also revealed positive impact on parent-child outcomes as families received stronger academic support for their children from the community and schools. Increased competence is managing children, felt by SCC staff from their CROPS training also translated to improvements in different desired child outcomes, such as improvement in self-confidence, self-management and relationship skills.

Finally, to increase the effectiveness of CROPS, the research team made their recommendations which includes, establishing a shared understanding of the CROPS service delivery framework with all stakeholders including parents, and providing platforms for sharing of best practices to enable various SCCs to develop their own unique services/ programmes that are targeted at children in the local context.