COUV ACTES - Psychologie communautaire

Community Psychology: Common Values, Diverse PracticesAn irish early childhood intervention: the Preparing for lifeprogrammeby Orla Doyle 1IntroductionThe intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic inequalities in children’s health, and cognitive, behaviouraland emotional development emerge early, and can persist through life (Najman et al., 2004; Shonoff & Philipps,2000). Limited evidence, primarily from the US, suggests that targeted, early intervention programmes aimed atdisadvantaged children and their families are an effective means of reducing these inequalities. Early childhoodinterventions are programmes that attempt to improve child health and development from conception to six yearsof age with the expectation that these improvements will have long-term benefits for child development and wellbeing(Wise et al., 2005). These studies find that the personal benefits (e.g., cognitive development, behaviourand social competence, educational attainment, earnings), social benefits (e.g., reduced delinquency and crime)and government savings (e.g., higher tax revenues, reduced social welfare spending), associated with interveningearly in a child’s life clearly outweigh the costs (Karoly et al., 2005). This paper discusses a new early childhoodintervention that has been initiated in Ireland.Development of the Preparing for Life ProgrammePreparing for Life (PFL) is a five-year school readiness programme involving the recruitment of a cohort of 200pregnant women residing in a disadvantaged area of North Dublin. The community is classified as disadvantagedas approximately 63% of its 6,439 inhabitants live in social housing (3.5 times the national average), while 14% ofits adults are out of work (compared to the national average of 4.8%). Similarly, only 5% of adults in thecommunity have a third level education, compared to a national average of 25%. In terms of ethnicity, thecommunity is fairly homogenous, with only 7% of the population being born outside the country (Central StatisticsOffice, 2006).The PFL programme is a community-based initiative which was developed in a bottom-up approach involving 28different community groups, local service providers and representatives from the local community. It wasdeveloped based on the recognition that children from this specific area were lagging behind their peers in termsof both cognitive and non-cognitive development. A representative survey assessing levels of school readiness ofchildren aged 4-5 attending the local primary schools found that teachers rated children in the PFL community asdisplaying significantly lower levels of school readiness than a Canadian norm (Doyle et al., 2009), on the Short1UCD Geary Institute, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.297