Age 3 - 5

This section lists interventions for pre-school children, aged between 3 years to 5 years.

Harlem Children's Zone

The Harlem Children’s Zone seeks to rebuild a very run-down part of New York with an ambitious pipeline which begins with The Baby College (a series of workshops for parents of children ages 0-3) and goes on to include best-practice programmes for children of every age through to college. The programme is judged to have closed the black-white achievement gap in its area of New York.

Head Start REDI

Head Start REDI is a child development based intervention that was integrated into Head Start settings. Results show children in REDI classes do better than typical Head Start classes, with gains especially in social skills, language development and emergent literary skills.

Research of Richard Tremblay

It is commonly said that the peak age for violent behaviour is mid-adolescence. Four decades of research by Professor Richard Tremblay demonstrate that a more accurate statement would be that while the visible consequences of violence are greatest in mid-adolescence, the peak age for aggression and violence in children is 2-3, with those children destined to be the most troublesome offenders in teenage years already distinguished at age 3 by levels of aggression 10 times higher than the most peaceable 30% of toddlers. Tremblay’s research is summarised and has an important message for the most effective age of intervention to reduce violence in society.

Healthy Families America

There is good evidence for the effectiveness of Healthy Families America in preventing child maltreatment. It is a national initiative to help parents get their newborns off to a healthy start. While participation is strictly voluntary, outreach is included in the initiative. Crucially, the home visiting is carried out by trained Family Support Workers rather than health visitors.

Croydon Total Place

The Croydon Total Place initiative has similarities with the above Highland Region approach, including team-working across agencies, single points of contact for difficult families, early identification etc, plus a number of additional ideas such as involvement of the community, proactively engaging parents and an Early Years Academy to train staff. An approach combining the best of both the Highland Region and Croydon models could deliver much improved outcomes for children as well as significant cost savings.

Roots of Empathy

Roots of Empathy (ROE) is a parenting programme for school children aged 3 to 14, currently being delivered with great success to over 50,000 children per annum in 2,000 classrooms in Canada, USA, Australia and since 2008 in the Isle of Man. It was introduced to both Northern Ireland and Scotland in 2010. Its fundamental goal is to break the intergenerational cycle of violence and poor parenting. Its introduction to Isle of Man, Northern Ireland and Scotland all arose from work carried out by WAVE with local communities or voluntary associations in these areas and with Roots of Empathy in Canada.