We tried a different preschool curriculum to prevent juvenile crime. When I checked in 20 years later, it was working

The so-called youth crime wave has recently become increasingly the focus of politics and the media, particularly in Queensland and the Northern Territory.

Unfortunately, this has led to harsh measures from the government and police. Curfews are in place for young people in Alice Springs.

Queensland Opposition Leader David Crisafulli (who is ahead in the polls ahead of this weekend's election) has suggested young people found guilty of some crimes should be tried as adults.

However, punitive measures against juvenile crime violate children's human rights and are a costly way to jeopardize community safety. It is much better to stop juvenile crime before it starts by supporting children's positive development in early childhood.

In a new evaluation released today, we found that a preschool program reduced the number of young people appearing in court by more than 50%. When the right family support was also provided, the children were even less likely to commit crimes.

Our original study

Early community-based crime prevention strategies were severely neglected in Australia. This is despite international evidence and the recommendations of a widely circulated Commonwealth Government report in 1999.

For more than 50 years, scientific evidence has been accumulating showing that the root causes of serious juvenile crime can be addressed in early childhood through prevention initiatives. The best-known example is the Perry Preschool Project, implemented in a disadvantaged area of ​​Michigan in the early 1960s.

In Australia, the Pathways to Prevention Project was conducted from 2002 to 2011 in a disadvantaged, multicultural region of Brisbane.

It was a collaboration between Griffith University, the Queensland Department of Education and national community agency Mission Australia.

The project's goal was to improve outcomes for children and youth through collaboration with local preschools, schools, families and community organizations.

In 2002 and 2003, 214 four-year-old children attending two local preschools received an enhanced program focusing on communication skills. This is called an “extended preschool program.”

It was integrated into the standard curriculum and taught by specialist teachers in collaboration with the children's class teachers and their parents.

The findings at the time showed that communication skills were directly related to success in school. They have also been linked to success in life through improved behavior and social skills.

The communication program brought children together in small groups with similar language proficiency levels. The groups were balanced in terms of gender and cultural background. They completed carefully selected activities such as games, bookmaking and reading.

These offered the children the opportunity to expand and practice their oral language skills in a way that was personally meaningful to them. These activities were led by specialist teachers who had postgraduate qualifications in communication and oral language development.

The specialist teachers engaged parents and children in joint activities and actively supported reading and language activities at home. In the first year, children who received the communications curriculum had better language skills, social skills, classroom behavior, and academic performance than children in the other preschools.

The children's families could also receive practical support from social workers from their own culture. This included parenting education, advocacy with government agencies and consultation. This lasted until 2011.

What's new?

Previous evaluations showed that the improved curriculum also helped improve children's school readiness, among a range of other benefits. We have now evaluated the long-term success of the program.

Using anonymized data linkage techniques, we followed up with students who received the expanded curriculum in 2002 to see what has happened since then.

Children who received the enhanced curriculum demonstrated improved classroom behavior throughout elementary school. They were also 56% less likely to have been involved in serious juvenile crime by age 17.

Read more: Is Australia in a youth crime crisis? That's what the data says

Remarkably, our analysis found that none of the children whose families also received support during preschool age went on to become delinquent.

The full Pathways program was implemented extensively in the community over a ten-year period, so we considered that it may have had a broader impact.

We examined juvenile crime rates in the region in 2008-16, when members of the 2002-03 preschool cohort were between 10 and 17 years old. It was 20% lower in this region than in other regions of Queensland with the same low socioeconomic levels.

How does this lead to less juvenile crime?

Programs like this work by leveling the playing field and improving the lives of children at an early stage of development. Developmental pathways are events and experiences that follow one another or cascade over the course of life.

For example, a difficult transition to school increases the likelihood of lack of engagement and academic problems. These are known risk factors for antisocial behavior.

The long-term impact of Pathways to Prevention on youth offending means it could be a model for similar programs across Australia.

This is especially true given our country’s chronic underinvestment in community-based developmental crime prevention. We need more programs in disadvantaged communities that are open to everyone and do not stigmatize people.

The vast majority of efforts across the country focus on early intervention for children who are identified as “at risk” in some way (e.g. because they exhibit disruptive behavior) or on the treatment of young people entering the juvenile justice system are involved.

There is too much reliance on juvenile detention in Queensland, which is often very harmful to children and has no preventive value.

Using Pathways as a model for other communities doesn't necessarily mean repeating exactly what we did (although that's important too). Any early prevention initiative has the best chance of success if it includes evidence-based strategies that improve children's life chances.

These can be implemented cost-effectively through existing systems, including preschools, schools and primary care. Ideally, they should operate through local partnerships involved in all phases of planning, data collection, implementation and evaluation.