Why has social and emotional learning been able to make so much more progress than other areas of prevention science? By lighting on the talents of instinctive collaborators and boundary breakers such as Roger Weissberg, who operates “like a synapse between neurons in the brain”, fastening together policy, practice and research in an unusual and inspiring way.

Almost exactly a year ago Prevention Action reported on the career of the Australian child health specialist Fiona Stanley and the debt she acknowledged to pioneering UK epidemiologist Professor Jerry Morris. Here’s more about Jerry Morris’s influential achievement and his part in surely one of the most elegant and far-reaching of twentieth century UK public health research studies.

A systematic review of all the reading progams on the market has concluded that co-operative learning - where students work together in small groups to help each other master their uncertainties – offers adolescents the best chance of escaping the long-term setbacks associated with reading difficulties.

Training “para-professionals” to implement proven programs faithfully in community settings looks like becoming part of successful “translation” strategies. But research from Minnesota shows that high standards need to be set and a link with research methods maintained if the reliability of outcome information isn’t to suffer.

A new report from the UK charity Shelter and the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) continues to find a strong association between bad housing and a string of childhood health and development problems – and points to the likelihood that a quarter of all UK children still experience overcrowding at some point in their young lives.