Incredible Years "Basic" makes a brave entry into the world of US child welfare services where up to 250,000 families a year feel the dubious benefit of evidence-free, empirically-light parent training.

Award-winning evaluator and meta-analysis specialist Mark Lipsey warns the elite company of Blueprints-approved prevention scientists that they will stifle invention if they allow their belief in “evidence-based” programs to become a narrow fixation.

Is a service to support vulnerable first-time parents going to be the first evidence-based prevention program on either side of the Atlantic to make the quantum leap "to scale".

From Florida come latest efforts to find a combination of reliable "social competency" programs, sound business management and long-term cost benefit to address young people's needs in straitened times.

Head teachers don’t know how to commission proven programs, program designers don’t know how to evaluate their own initiatives – and there has been far too little investment in remedying either problem. Little wonder, says a UK think tank, that some schools have been resorting to “bad science” in their efforts to rescue disaffected pupils.

A UK government department defines “early intervention” limply as a strategy for "tackling problems that have already emerged," and gives stalwart preventionist MP Graham Allen an opportunity to remind the House of Commons that as well as swatting mosquitoes, the electorate must have a proper program for draining the swamp.

Here's a new paradox for the implementers of evidence-based programs: most developers of most successful products are striving to make them smaller, faster and more efficient. But year by year the realities of mass distribution tend to make even the best more cumbersome to manage and less versatile.

Blueprints conference delegates hear from seven giants how a better understanding of the way public systems operate will help more ordinary mortals take evidence-based programs to scale.

The latest Blueprints conference is pushing those already sold on evidence-based programs to face up to the hard realities of quality implementation.

Offering US federal funding to neighborhood child welfare projects on condition that communities gather and analyze impact data is focusing attention on the lack of well-being measures robust enough to be the basis of national comparisons.

What cancels out all errors, mitigates the effects of any forces that might or might not arise during operation and produces a response in the system that perfectly matches the user's wishes? Who cares! Program developers will buy it whatever you call it.