Halfon – preventing problems by investing early

When one looks across some of the nations and you see that Canada, Australia, England and the US, we’re all countries that were established under a, an ideology that really comes out of the Elizabethan poor laws that basically said that children and families had to fail between, before government was going to step in. What we’ve seen in the last 10, 15 years, with all the brain science, and all of what is learned about early child development, what we know now, is if we wait for children to fail, and wait for our systems to detect that they’ve failed and then intervene what we’re going to do is, we’re going to is, we’re going to send lots of children into very low trajectories. Because once you intervene at age eight, or nine, or 10, for learning problems, behavioural and other things that could have been assessed and diagnosed or prevented at age two, three and four, not only is it very expensive to do, it’s not usually as effective as preventing the problem in the first place. 

And so what we’re starting to recognize is that we need to revamp our systems. We can’t use the old ideology, we can’t use the old rescue tactics, and we can’t just focus on the disabled, but we really need to be thinking about how do we actually have, as is the meeting laid out, you know, “Equity from the start”, how do we actually optimize development from the start, how do we make sure that the developmental trajectories of children are, you know, reach their maximum potential by design, not be default. And so that’s a different way of doing things. So what we’re starting to see, in the English-speaking countries, as they try to, you know, throw off the yoke of the Elizabethan poor laws, is that they’re beginning to think about, how do we  restructure and re-engineer the systems.