The strategic thinking of Nobel prize winning economist James Heckman, a package of prevention programs based on models from the US and northern Europe, and proposals for a UK assessment body of the caliber of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado combine in a major experiment announced today by the UK city of Nottingham.

The UK Good Childhood Inquiry delivers another sharp warning to UK policy makers that they are neglecting the mental health and well-being of the children in their care to the point that most parents think their childhood was happier than their sons’ and daughters’.

The Guardian’s Ben Goldacre spells out the danger that mere lip service to scientific principles will backfire and schools won’t trust advice about anything that it might be pleasurable or rewarding for children to do unless it’s dressed up in the “neurosciency language” of the Brain Gym.

The possibly short-lived fashion for international adoption has produced an interesting demographic in the US: a generation of children from China, Russia, Guatemala or Kazakhstan raised in multicultural families and inclined to say of themselves as they get older, "I can’t fit in at home, and I can’t fit in here”.

Increasingly convincing evidence that any truly effective program will generally save public money in the long run is giving Washington policy makers the confidence to make well-calculated, long-term investments in prevention strategies.

Paradoxes abound: about two-thirds of US schools run substance abuse programs, but fewer than a third use proven models. Even in the aftermath of an experience as searing as the Columbine High School massacre, the policy debate focused on police response and victim support, not on the prevention of violence.