Professor Frances Gardner
Professor Frances Gardner is Professor of Child and Family Psychology in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, and Fellow of Wolfson College.
Her research focuses on the development and testing of parenting interventions for reducing child behaviour problems, and violence against children, in high as well as low- and middle-income countries. She investigates how to adapt and transfer parenting interventions across cultures and countries, the mechanisms of change, and the subgroups of families and children for whom these interventions are most effective.
Professor Gardner led the systematic reviews for the first ever WHO Guidelines on parenting interventions for reducing maltreatment of children, and served on the Guideline expert group. She is co-founder of Parenting for Lifelong Health, a suite of low-cost, open-source parenting programmes, and now a UK charity, PLH, dedicated to training and implementation. As part of the Global Parenting Initiative, her current projects include adapting, testing and scaling parenting interventions in primary healthcare in Thailand, the cash transfer system in the Philippines, and the pre-school system in Malaysia.
Professor Gardner led the systematic reviews for the first ever WHO Guidelines on parenting interventions for reducing maltreatment of children and served on the Guideline expert group. She presented these findings at WHO’s first Global Ministerial Conference on ending violence against children in Bogota in 2024, where her evidence contributed to pledges made by Ministers from over 100 countries to enact policies for reducing violence against children.
She was founder director of the graduate programme in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI) which began in 2003. In 2021, she was awarded the prestigious Academy of Social Sciences Fellowship, which recognises excellence and impact in the social sciences. She served from 2012-2024 on the board of Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development at the University of Colorado, the longest standing “What Works” clearinghouse for prevention programs, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Society for Prevention Research. Professor Gardner was appointed as a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George (CMG) in the King’s Birthday Honours 2025 list in recognition of her services to reducing violence against children.
Frances's research focuses primarily on Parenting interventions for reducing child antisocial behaviour and violence against children. She researches the development of anti-social behaviour or conduct problems in children and young people, particularly how early parenting style influences young people's adjustment, and how this can help inform intervention development, and understand its mechanisms of effect. She conducts randomised controlled trials of community-based parenting programmes in several countries, as well as systematic reviews, investigating questions about effectiveness of parenting interventions for families and children, for reducing antisocial behaviour, and for reducing harsh parenting and violence against children. She has a particular interest in investigating differential effects of interventions for families and children with varying clinical characteristics and from different social and cultural backgrounds; and in parenting intervention mechanisms of change, and transportability across countries and cultures. She has experience in direct observational methods for assessing parent-child interaction.
Her secondary area of interest is in Risk and resilience in young people’s mental health: this work investigates factors promoting poor mental health versus resilient outcomes in young people, using longitudinal studies of the development of antisocial behaviour and other mental health problems in young people, with low income families in the USA, and with orphans and vulnerable children in South Africa. She has also used UK national cohort data to assess how risk factors for antisocial behaviour, such as parenting, have changed over recent decades.
Her work has considerable impact on policy and practice; she advises to government ministries in many countries, as well as to WHO and UNICEF; she is a founder member of WHO’s ‘Parenting for Lifelong Health’ initiative; she serves on the Board of ‘Blueprints for Violence Prevention’, on a WHO Expert Panel on Standard of Evidence in Violence Prevention, and previously, the Scientific Advisory Board for the National Academy of Parenting Practitioners, and for SFI, the Danish National Centre for Social Research; and on a UNODC Expert Panel on worldwide family skills training. She is Associate Editor of ‘Prevention Science’, and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology.
Frances would be especially interested in supervising doctoral students wishing to work on the following topics:
· Parenting and Family Interventions (primarily)
· Child Mental Health – prevention and treatment
· Development and Prevention of anti-social and risky behaviour in young people
· Child and Family interventions in developing countries
· Child maltreatment
