Obstacles to randomized controlled trials including the foibles of badly trained professionals who mistake consumer satisfaction for evidence of effectiveness mean that many children’s services programs don’t work and some quite likely do harm, says Dartington Social Research Unit director Michael Little. He proposes a systematic approach that makes strategies for rigorous evaluation one of the cornerstones of service design.

Much more than three years ago, such an event would have struggled to arouse serious interest except perhaps among stern opponents of experimental methods. Now enthusiasm among politicians and policy makers for randomized controlled trials is so keen that the argument has moved to a higher level of sophistication: this year’s speakers will discuss whether the synthesis of the results of many trials holds the key to surer social policy making?

The complaint against the science behind children’s services used to be that it was plain inferior to anything in the natural sciences. The work of the average social scientist was barely worth a physics lab. technician’s white coat. But as the complexity of the task is better understood, attitudes are changing.

Evidence oversold, misleading claims about brain development, exaggeration of the stability of preschool impairments, too little account taken of the difference between effective trials and efficacy – prevention scientists have some remedial work to do!

“I am more interested in building cross-party support than launching a moral crusade,” the Conservative party’s leading convert to the cause of prevention and early intervention has told conference delegates from central and local government, the professions, business and academia meeting in Windsor Great Park.

Proven prevention models have begun to cross the Atlantic in encouraging force but the UK continues to lag behind the US when it comes to fidelity of implementation and experimental evaluation of impact. The annual Michael Sieff Foundation conference, which opened on the outskirts of London, yesterday, is attempting to revitalize the child health and development agenda.

A London study of the occurrence and characteristics of adult psychological problems among people diagnosed with autism in childhood has struggled to find any pattern.

US anti-social behavior expert and preventative check-up specialist Tom Dishion tells a London audience of children’s services experts that effective interventions are going more the way of good dentistry than of emergency health-care.

UK members of parliament from both main political camps are calling for a major overhaul of the country's approach to social problems based on unprecedented investment in prevention science and early intervention.

US researchers who have been comparing the different standardized measures of performance and how they portray a school’s failure or success, have uncovered evidence that the administration’s No Child Left Behind initiative has been penalizing child poverty, not the failings of bad schools.

London researchers are attempting to go beyond the realm of purely ethical concerns to formulate a conceptual framework to describe the various levels of patient involvement in health research and their comparative value.

Unexpectedly optimistic findings about the effects on child development of prenatal exposure to substance abuse suggest that post natal prevention and early intervention services are likely to be more effective than has long been feared.

Model parents raise model adolescents – well sometimes, maybe; or is it as much that certain children who stay away from drink and drugs, for example, allow their parents the luxury of seeming to be good?

Lengthy trials of Fast Track, a multi-dimensional response to the needs of troubled and troublesome young children, are continuing to indicate lasting benefits, especially in relation to preventing the onset of conduct disorder and anti-social behavior.

Universal parenting programs can be expected to benefit children’s physical well-being as well as their emotional and social development, according to findings emerging from a longitudinal UK study of parenting and health in mid-childhood.

It seldom happens but it creates a conundrum when it does: US researchers are finding that one social “disease” – cigarette smoking – seems to protect those who experience it from becoming the victims of another another – obesity.

With support from Harvard University human development specialist Felton Earls, researchers in Rio de Janeiro are drawing attention to the continuing plight of Brazilian children by calling for an evaluation of the effectiveness of the country’s breakthrough Child and Adolescent Rights Act.

University research from Los Angeles, one of the dark center’s of US gang culture, highlights the potential – and dangerous volatility – of the peer group as a carrier of good – and bad – influence.