Doctor Suzanne Zeedyk: A shared vision
Many of the things that we have been talking about here build on century old ideas, and certainly discussions about how we should bring up children. It is impossible to exist in a family or in a society with children without ideas about how you should bring them up. And different cultures have different ideas and different values about what they want to instil in their children.
Whatever ones values are, the exciting thing about the neuro-scientific evidence is that it helps us to make more sense about why those practices have long lasting outcomes. That is why I think it is so exciting for other people to know about, it is really cutting edge. The last ten years have produced all sorts of new things about brain development, so the key things we are finding out from the neuro-scientific evidence is that babies come into the world connected, and that their brains develop on the basis of that connection.
That has also led to very interesting economic analyses; you don’t normally think of economists as worrying about childcare practices, but an increasing number of economists are. And what their work is showing is that you get the biggest pay-off financially for society, by putting money into the early years. Very roughly the figures are something like one to ten, although it depends on how you measure things and when you measure them, it may be more than one to ten. But what that means is that for every £1 we put in in the early years we save £10 later in the cost of mental health costs, educational attainment and criminal justice costs. A simple way to understand it is that it’s because what is happening in those early years is shaping brain development, and children’s understanding of their relations to others. So if we put the money in early we save costs later on. But, of course, that is not the way budgets are organised; institutions and sectors have the budget for their bit, for now, so they have the education budget, or they have the health budget, or they have the criminal justice budget, they don’t often talk to each other. When they try to do joint working people standardly giggle, because it is hard to do joint working.
I think if we invest now we save now and we save later. So if you invest now, and you support a family to keep from putting their child into care, you have just saved £130,000. So with the some of the parenting groups that we have run with my colleagues, we calculate that it costs £200 for a six week course; and some of those parents have told us that it was so crucial in supporting them that they didn’t put their children into care. So it cost us £200, it saved us £129,800 to do something else with, not down the line, but now. If that child had gone into care now we would be needing to spend that money now. So to not think about this relationship and these financial issues is simply dumb; it’s not just a good idea to think about it, it’s a dumb idea not to do it. So rather than saying, can we afford to put money into early years, the right question is can we afford not to put money into early years, because at the moment we – you, me, all of us – pay for the consequences of what didn’t happen for our adults now, what didn’t happen for them as children.