early-intervention-next-steps

Chapter 1
Early Intervention: providing the social and
emotional bedrock for all children
What you see consistently are children at a very early age starting school
already behind. That’s why I’ve said that I’m going to put billions of dollars
into early childhood education… Every dollar that we spend in early
childhood education, we get $10 back in reduced dropout rates, improved
reading scores. That’s the kind of commitment we have to make early on.
Introduction
1. Early Intervention enables every baby, child and
young person to acquire the social and emotional
foundations upon which our success as human
beings depends. Most parents give this to their
children, and often by instinct and common sense
alone, but all of our children deserve nothing less.
A child who is rounded, capable and sociable has
a great chance in life. Those denied these qualities
have a bad start and few of them recover. During
their lifetimes they can impose heavy penalties on
themselves and generate major costs, fnancial and
social, for their families, local communities and the
national economy. In our book in 2008 Iain Duncan
Smith and I outlined the essential philosophy of
Early Intervention as a means to forestall bad
outcomes for children and society, and I do not
repeat this here.
2. However, it is important to set the scene in this
introduction. The message remains the same: there
are no quick fxes, no magic bullet, just a long-term
programme of hard work. I am asking all parties
and all governments, this one and its successors,
to settle on a sustained policy, generation after
generation, for our children. If we can do this we
Barack Obama
will not only improve current society but also ofer
that which succeeds it a new and better level of
health and well-being by building this into the early
lives of its youngest members.
Early and late intervention
3. There are now two competing cultures: the
dominant one – of late intervention – and the
growing one – of Early Intervention. I explore in
later chapters how we can bring these two into
better balance. It is not an either/or – we must
continue to swat the mosquitoes but we can drain
the swamp too. The bleak truth is that decades
of expensive late intervention have failed. Major
social problems have got worse not better: despite
heroic frontline eforts tackling the symptoms,
their causes often remain unaddressed. Little
or no value for money can be demonstrated
for the billions of pounds spent on current late
intervention programmes and little prospect
of value from the billions set aside fatalistically
for such programmes in the future. It is quite
right to be asked to give a strong evidence base
for Early Intervention programmes (and we do
this in this Report) but the default position of
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