MPs from the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology – chaired by the Liberal Democrat MP for North Norfolk Norman Lamb – have suggested that the provision of early interventions combatting childhood adversity and trauma are “fragmented” and in need of improvement.

The Select Committee’s final report (published November 14th – see here) recommends that by 2022, a new early intervention strategy should be in place, one that can facilitate greater training of “the early years workforce” and offer more guidance for local authorities, often the key distributors of support here.

One of the report’s most notable recommendations from a Pro Bono Economics perspective however is a call for improvements to be made to the effectiveness with which data collection and analysis take place. This in a bid to ensure that the best measures possible are used to assess the effectiveness of early interventions and identify families who could stand to benefit most.

At Pro Bono Economics, we are already seeing the benefits of such data collection in other areas; notably the Ministry of Justice’s DataLab and its regular reports for charities working in prisoner rehabilitation.  As such we welcome the Committee’s call for an equivalent approach to data collection for early years intervention, and now eagerly anticipate the prospective response from Government to the report’s recommendations.

For more information please contact Simon Burns at [email protected].