Prevention does work and there is a powerful economic case for it

Prevention/early-years (age 0-3) intervention is fruitful and cost-effective. Negative family cycles can be transformed and children given the opportunity to grow into fulfilled, contributing adults – and future parents.

At present, as the graph shows, we spend money in exactly the opposite way to what would be most effective. This is because tiny children are not yet causing trouble in society.

So we spend on later ages, when trouble is visible, but when the impact of the money spent is reducing, instead of spending on the earliest possible age, when the impact is huge.

Research confirms prevention and early-years intervention work

Compelling research evidence shows early intervention works at the level of health, social effectiveness and preventing the development of propensity to violence.

The financial benefits of early intervention far outweigh the costs. The RAND Corporation made economic evaluations of 5 approaches to reducing crime. This evaluation took a narrow view of the financial benefits of parent training, and put no financial value on the prevention of child abuse or of any other benefits besides crime reduction.

Even with this restricted view, parent training emerged as highly cost-effective for preventing serious crime. In addition, the programme called Nurse Family Partnership (or Family Nurse Partnership in the UK) was found to deliver benefits four times its cost over the life of the child, and to have repaid its cost by the time the child was 4 years old.

The very earliest intervention is to teach children how to be successful parents while they are still at school themselves. A wonderful programme for doing this is Roots of Empathy, in which a baby (with either its mother or both parents) is brought to the classroom regularly and the schoolchildren learn about the infant’s stages of development from 3 to 12 months of age. The method exposes the children first-hand to nurturing parenting – sometimes for the first time in their lives. Side benefits include significant reductions in bullying and increases in children being able to talk about their feelings.

Pages 35-37 of the 2005 WAVE Report outline part of the case for intervening early and Section 7 (page 39) outlines proven interventions, evaluated on strict criteria. An update of the cost-effectiveness case as at October 2010 can be found on pages 61-66 of our WAVE International Early Intervention Review 2010.