The cost of late intervention
The Centre for Early Childhood communicates that:
‘When parents lack support and their children miss the opportunity to develop healthily during pregnancy and up to the age of five, the personal and human costs can be great, and the effects on the individual reverberate across society.’
In 2021 The Royal Foundation of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge ‘Big Change, Starts Small’ initiative commissioned the London School of Economics (LSE) to look at the most recent data on public expenditure.
The LSE’s study produced an estimate for 2018 to 2019 of lost opportunities in the early years i.e. expenditure that might be avoided or replaced if preventative action were taken in early childhood.
The estimate included long-term expenditure associated with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). It calculated that the costs associated with lost opportunity in 2018 to 2019, in England alone, were in the region of £16.13 billion. To put this spend into perspective, £16.13 billion a year represents 5 times the total annual spend on early education and childcare entitlements and around 44 times the investment in specialist perinatal mental health services between 2015 to 2016 and 2021.
What we know
There are several programmes and interventions evidenced to support the aim to give every child the best start in life. These include:
- integrated universal, targeted and specialist support to families from the antenatal period up to adolescence across the social gradient
- targeted high-quality family learning interventions to maximise children’s learning in the home environment for families across the social gradient
- interventions at the earliest opportunity for the complex problems some families face
- high quality early years provision to maximise children’s learning, development, and school readiness
- general information and advice to parents and carers to support positive parenting and nurturing home environments
- programmes to help ensure that babies and toddlers stay safe in and around the home to reduce the number of unintentional injuries