The ‘Preventative Services’ agenda

Nathan Loynes

Key Themes• Social Justice• Anti-poverty Strategy• Non-stigmatised services• Infantile determinism and brain malleability • The USA influence of headstart• Proactive services including APIR (CAF)

assessments and ‘Outreach’• Every Child Matters• The Children’s Plan • The recession and reducing taxpayer costs.

New Labour’s Ideology: (Ruth Levitas, 1998)

1. Redistribution of wealth to tackle poverty. 2. The moral underclass, impoverished values

caused by material social exclusion. 3. The need for social integration.

Refer to Gianna Knowles Chapter in your pack on ‘Social Justice’ which is the arching term for the above.

Why Early Intervention?

• “ Like it or not, the most important mental and behavioural patterns, once established, are difficult to change once children enter school.” (Heckman & Wax, 2004).

• In other words, the Jesuit maxim: ““Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man”.

Financial Investment and return

Or put another way (Schweinhart, Barnes & Weikart, 1993) Perry preschool evaluation)

Critical Period

• “There is a critical period’ which extends for at least the first few years of life (Rose & Chalmers, 1971, p. 247). During this critical period aspects of cognitive functioning, related to experience and symbolic functioning can be enhanced.” (Source: Athey, 2007, p 32)

Human Capacity to Learn

What you take into school is what you take out of school

“ If the race is already halfway run even before children begin school, then we clearly need to examine what happens in the earliest years.” (Esping-Andersen, 2005)

Melhuish (2006)

Assessment (CAF) and ‘Early Intervention’

Summary• The expansion of services for children between 1997-2008 was

unprecedented. (ECM).• There are ‘ideological’ arguments for helping the disadvantaged;

perhaps summed up by ‘social justice’.• There are ‘evidence informed’ arguments for helping the

disadvantaged; perhaps summed up by ‘the Heckman curve’.• Early intervention and preventative services require a more

sophisticated understanding and application of ‘children’s needs’ than perhaps envisaged by thresholds of s.17; s.47 of The Children Act 1989.

• Sure Start/Children’s centres were a manifestation of Labour ideology (Levitas, 1998)

• Evaluations of ‘preventative services’ (i.e. the effectiveness of SureStart) are somewhat tenuous in the UK.

• Question: Should we pursue preventative agendas without conclusive evidence of their effectiveness?