Action for Children’s new report Deprivation and risk: the case for early intervention repeats much that will be familiar to policymakers and campaigners. The importance of prevention, the need for holistic solutions, the attention to economic inequality – these ideas have underpinned public policy over the past decade, providing the rationale for a range of interventions from tax credits to action on teenage pregnancy, from parenting orders to Sure Start. The problem hasn’t mostly been that the wrong solutions have been adopted, but that the right ones have been applied inconsistently, partially, or without sustained investment, leaving practitioners frustrated and parents disenchanted.
So what’s significant about the report isn’t so much the analysis it offers, or the argument it makes (that there’s both an economic and a moral case for early, preventative action: failure to do so costs the public purse heavily in picking up the pieces, it wastes children’s potential and blights their childhoods), but the timing of it, as we enter a period when tough choices about public spending priorities are to be made. And here campaigners must be canny, and politicians thoughtful – for the report certainly isn’t a prescription for public spending cuts.
Two pitfalls must be avoided in developing the policy response to the report. First, we must reject arguments that some interventions ‘matter’ more than others, so that only some solutions are picked out for attention – it’s clear that only multiple approaches address multiple disadvantage, we can’t pick and choose. Of course we need to be sure that individual interventions are effective, but the underlying message of the report is that a holistic approach is needed, in which the whole adds up to more than the sum of the parts. And second, the policies proposed must not be seen as relevant for only a narrow group of very disadvantaged families, excusing disinvestment in mainstream public services on which all families rely.
In tight fiscal circumstances, it may take political courage to accept those are the implications of the report’s findings and recommendations – but a half-hearted response will simply pile up cost, hardship and injustice further down the line.