Counting the cost of not intervening early for young children and families – welcoming the new report from the Royal Foundation

Isos Partnership very warmly welcomes the announcement of the Royal Foundation's new Centre for Early Childhood and we are pleased to have been able to play a role in supporting their launch report: Big Change Starts Small.

The report draws on brain science to make the critical link between how effectively we, as a society, support children and families in the first five years, and later life outcomes. It also includes new analysis from colleagues at LSE who calculate the annual public costs of late intervention to be at least £16.13billion – for context, that is nearly five times the annual spend on childcare entitlements and 44 times what was spent on specialist perinatal mental health over the past five years. The LSE figures suggest that local authorities bear much of the brunt of these costs through, for example, children's social care and costs associated with school exclusions. This is part of a well-documented national trend that has seen spending on looked-after children rise significantly and left early help and children's centres particularly vulnerable to the impacts of austerity. There are likely to be other long-term costs for the NHS and criminal justice system from failing to act preventatively, which it was not possible to capture fully.

In an era of renewed tight public spending, the focus on long-term cost-benefit analysis feels like a particularly important contribution. Whilst no-one would claim that it would be possible to avoid entirely the costs of “late intervention” through earlier spending upstream (indeed the report does not make this claim), it is a powerful reminder of the value of prevention. Many of the local authorities we have worked with over the last ten years have made positive decisions to continue to invest in early help and children’s centres. Yet as our recent Working for Babies report for the First 1001 Days Movement illustrates, there is significant variation locally in how effectively support for 0-2-year-olds is working and how resilient it is.

The “buzz” in this area now is Andrea Leadsom’s proposed Family Hubs. All is still to play for, both in terms of how they are defined and the extent of financial support that underpins them. Work we have been doing engaging professionals and local service leaders across the country on the question of how they “build back better for babies” suggests there is no shortage of ideas from the frontline in this space. Many professionals and leaders report that they have developed a far more sophisticated and dynamic understanding of the needs of families through their work in the pandemic, and that their services have strengthened through new and stronger local relationships and collaborations. They are keen to harness the power of these changes in a new, flexible, integrated and place-based offers for families. In areas where leaders are strongly committed to this agenda – frequently the ones who have also managed to preserve their focus on early support and prevention – they are already taking steps toward this. The challenge now for national policy-makers is to ensure that local areas that are not in this position do not “miss the moment”. We will be publishing a pamphlet with the First 1001 Days Movement reporting on this work before the summer.