Is early intervention printing the dream ticket?

Prevention science moved higher up the emerging UK political agenda this week with the publication of a pointedly cross-party pamphlet about the virtues of early intervention.

Co-authored by the former Conservative party leader Iain Duncan Smith and Labour MP Graham Allen, whose Nottingham constituency is already piloting proven US models, Early Intervention: Good Parents, Great Kids, Better Citizens lays claim to a strategy for averting “social collapse”.

The alliance between authors is underlined by a publishing coalition between Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice [1] and the Leftish Smith Institute [2], named after the former Labour party leader, the late John Smith.

"We are challenging outdated thinking in all parties,” the authors say. “We need to build a social and political consensus if we are to go beyond treating the symptoms and break the inter-generational nature of our social problems. We hope our personal collaboration is the forerunner of something at national level."

The two MPs are urging UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Conservative leader David Cameron to endorse further moves, including:

• writing intervention policies in their party manifestos
• setting up a long-term research comparison between groups of children with and without early intervention
• setting up National Policy Assessment Centre to examine and recommend the best early intervention policies.

The Treasury should find a way to release more funds now to finance schemes that would ultimately achieve "massive" savings in the future, they add, calling for acknowledgment of their approach in the next public spending review.

Much is made in their pamphlet of the of the early intervention initiative launched by Graham Allen, last April, on behalf of the Local Strategic “One Nottingham” Partnership.

A key element in that package is a $1.39m pilot of the Nurse-Family Partnership. The $19.9million Midlands city program also acknowledges the value of Triple P, The Incredible Years, Big Brothers, Big Sisters of America and Sweden's Mother Care Pregnancy Centers.

For the first time in the UK, the organizers say, a comprehensive “virtuous circle" of policies across the 0-18 age group has been put in place. The portfolio of services includes:

• preconception support
• the teaching of SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) to every primary school child
• an anti-crime course for every ten-year-old in the city
• a drug and alcohol aware program for every pre-teen child
• pre-parenting courses for every teenager.

The new pamphlet extends the argument and pumps up the political volume. Unless concerted action is taken, the authors claim that Britain will be "saddled with a new generation of disturbed and aggressive young people doomed to repeat and amplify the social breakdown disfiguring their lives and others around them".

"And once they fall behind their peer group, they are all too often on a slippery slope to social exclusion, crime or drugs. It costs far more to help a teenager who has become entrenched in this kind of disadvantage...than it would to stop him or her falling behind in the first place."

[For more about long-term cost benefit, see, for example, Prevention science gets a big bang theory [3]