Predicting adult life outcomes from earlier signals: identifying those at Risk (Report for PMSU, version 2.2)
(August 31, 2006) Leon Feinstein
and Ricardo Sabates
WBL Discussion Paper 07-01
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This report was written for the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit in the Summer of 2006. It is about the capability of practitioners to target resources preventatively rather than waiting until problems have become entrenched and acute or reactive services are required. The report summarises findings from the UK Birth Cohort data about the extent to which information about children and their family environments is predictive of later outcomes. The outcomes are those which tend to be associated with personal harm for young people and adults and social cost for those in their environment and wider society.
The relationship between childhood risk and high cost or high harm outcomes in adolescence or adulthood is not always deterministic, mechanistic or inevitable. There are many steps on the pathway from risk to outcome. There are children at risk who do not experience harmful outcomes and there are children with low apparent or observable risk who do. Therefore policy responses must allow for flexibility and change.
We find a potentially very high level of accuracy in the extent to which we can identify those at risk using early childhood information about family context and child development. In our view these findings are a challenge to which current central and local government should respond with appropriate and measured policy in the interests of social inclusion, personal welfare and the wider economic and social development of the UK.
