Keating – universal and targeted

Obviously in the last century in the 20^th century we developed and expanded the notion of universal education for everyone. That was a massive universal intervention and has had huge positive impacts in terms of the skill levels of populations, in terms of all kinds of downstream benefits to that. That’s a universal intervention. We need to be thinking about what’s the equivalent really good universal intervention for early childhood. We really need to figure out how to do that. It won’t follow exactly a school model, but it’s not going to be entirely different either. We now regard k-12 schooling at least and then post-secondary and tertiary education beyond that as an absolutely settled institutional issue. We have to remember a century ago it wasn’t, it wasn’t a settled issue. It wasn’t even presumed that everybody ought to go to school; elementary much less high school. So these are institutions that we build to acknowledge and recognize and devote our resources to things that we think are important.  

Then we have the targeted interventions, kids who are at risk either because of difficult early experiences, disadvantaged social circumstances and so forth or anomalies that are arising for physical reasons, for genetic or epigenetic anomalies that have arisen. We need to try to figure out how to identify those risk factors earlier and earlier, and what we now are understanding is there’s hardly any of those things that can go off the rails that don’t benefit from being identified and dealt with earlier. And so clearly early targeted programming for kids who may be at risk either biologically or socially is a hugely important kind of thing and again, emphasizes that impact, the investment impact difference that we see in early childhood.  

And frankly on the clinical side we outta be prepared to recognize there’s a pretty serious problem going on sooner than we do. We now don’t wait until fourth grade to say oh this child can’t read, let’s start an intervention, we begin that process quite early on now, and many other areas we’re doing the same sort of thing, and even earlier we can probably begin to do that. So, the blend, the mix of universal, targeted, and individual services is obviously a blend that we need to think about. They have strengths and weaknesses, but they are complimentary. Universal are expensive in total but they’re cheap per individual. Targeted are a little bit more expensive, but they have a fairly big impact, and when you need to have someone who’s already off the rails to help them get back on a positive developmental pathway, well the sooner you do that the less expensive it’s going to be. And so the basic notion we have to keep in mind is that the appropriate mix of these things that will enable us to both support healthy development where it’s already happening, get it back onto a healthy pathway where it may be at risk of or has already gone off the rails, that is the way to flatten the gradient, and that’s the kind of social policy that we need.