Iain Duncan Smith has polished his social policy credentials by announcing a new review on early intervention.

The effects of good quality child care outside the nuclear family are still apparent in adolescence and the higher the quality of care, the more marked the benefits. But the effects on behaviour are more difficult to assess, suggests a recently published study in the United States.

How to judge what works in children’s services? Researchers have come up with a computer programme that creates a “silent” control group to replace the usual simplistic assumptions about how we measure mental health interventions.

Plenty of prevention programs die of their own inertia. They just don’t have the right person pushing it to grow. That right person, for so many flourishing programs, has been Clay Yeager. Based in Pennsylvania, he started as a parole officer, but sought better ways to help kids. He succeeded.

Get involved in your childrens’ schooling and their grades will improve. That’s the recommendation from innumerable sources from parenting magazines to the US Department of Health and Human Services to the US’s National Parent Teacher Association. But where’s the evidence? A longitudinal study has found the effects of parental involvement may not be so clear cut.

New research suggests efforts to narrow the gap in life expectancy between rich and poor in England have run aground. But is it too soon to judge or has the focus been too narrow?

Whatever the reservations of schools about the costs of programmes to improve their pupil’s well-being., new research shows boosting children’s social and emotional skills is key to improving their academic performance.

When Robert Martinson concluded that nothing worked when it came to criminal rehabilitation programs, one result in the US was prisons. The government built lots and lots of prison. Over the past forty years, those prisons have been filled and are now bursting. Public coffers are groaning under the strain and the question is, what now?

Prevention Action traces the origin of the idea that any effort to rehabilitate prisoners will end in tears. The epithet “nothing works” springs from a number of sources, but the leading proponent was sociologist Robert Martinson who became the face of the of the gloomy, and ultimately wrong-headed notion.

Tracking how well prevention programs are doing is hard under normal circumstances. Put that program in Alaska and the problems multiply exponentially. Knowlton Johnson shows you how to track a program when there are no roads.

Researchers at Penn State are studying how a program is taken from incubation stage to full-scale roll out. The science is still new but there are some important lessons to be learned. Penn State’s Celene Domitrovich tells us what to look for.

Children can’t be taught to control themselves. That idea had been part of the conventional wisdom for so long that few thought to question it. But researchers at Florida State University decided to look at all the studies conducted looking at children’s impulsivity. They found that children might not be as out of control as previously thought.

The best antidote for a family under duress is a good social network, and good connections. The phrase is social capital, and any prevention program worth its salt is going to have to learn how to create it if it really wants to help kids.