The ideas importer

A mock Tudor house on a residential street in East Croydon is not the obvious setting for the headquarters of a charity dedicated to expanding some of the UK’s most pioneering early intervention programmes. But the Wave Trust likes to do things differently.

Although its chief executive was a senior adviser to Graham Allen’s early intervention review, and the Centre for Social Justice credits it with inspiring its families policy, the charity itself is relatively unknown. Set up by George Hosking in 1996, the trust’s stated ambition is to drive a 70 per cent reduction in child abuse and neglect in the UK by the year 2030.

An economist and accountant by background, Hosking spent 17 years working for Unilever in finance and international strategy, before starting his own consultancy to help transform the fortunes of international businesses.

His decision to set up the charity came as the result of some horrendous cases of child abuse in the 1980s and early 90s, in particular the cases of Jasmine Beckford, Martin Nicoll and Leanne White.

"I read the full details of what had happened in the newspapers, much more than I had ever before. Something snapped inside me. I can’t say I made a decision; the decision made me. The decision was that I couldn’t live in a world where things like this happen to children and I do nothing about it. That has really driven my life ever since."

Tackling the root cause

The softly spoken Scot, who is also a Quaker, admits he had "no clue" about how to set up a charity at the start. "I began to apply my strategic planning training to the question of how we could reduce child abuse," he says. "The first thing I did was to do a review of what is done all over the world, because Unilever had taught me to think globally. I looked at how both charities and governments were tackling child abuse all over the world and I found the same thing everywhere. They were all alleviating the symptoms, but none of them seemed to be tackling the root causes."

So Hosking’s plan to establish a charity confronting the origins of child abuse was set in motion. For the first nine years of Wave’s existence, it focused almost solely on carrying out research into the root causes of child abuse.

"We rapidly discovered that there was an interaction between violence and child abuse and neglect," Hosking says. "Maybe 30 to 40 per cent of children who are abused or neglected develop violent personalities. Also, a huge proportion of people in prison – some studies say 68 per cent – have been abused or neglected as children. So having started off with a focus on child abuse, Wave became very focused on interpersonal violence."

Hungry to understand the subject matter, he went back to university for a third time and spent two years training to become a clinical criminologist, having already taken a second degree in psychology mid-way through his career. This led him to volunteer at prisons including Brixton, Wandsworth and Parkhurst.

"I like to get hands-on experience of a subject," he smiles. "But I was too small to become a police officer, so I trained to go into prisons and work with violent offenders. Touch wood, so far not one of the people who has completed a programme of work with me has reoffended with a violent offence."

Although the term "early intervention" is currently in vogue in the UK, he believes it is used too loosely, arguing that there are three specific types of early intervention. "There is primary prevention, which is preventing harm being done to children before it occurs," he says. "That to me is the most important and effective and that is where it is the most critical to focus resources.

"Then there is foundation-years early intervention, which is where you intervene in the first five years of a child’s life and make sure that everything possible is done to support them before they go to school. The government is improving in what it’s doing in that period."

He goes on: "The third type is what I call remedial early intervention, which is where things have gone wrong in the first five years of life, but we try and intervene at school age, when children haven’t yet gone down a completely negative pathway. For example, the Allen review’s 25 recommended programmes particularly focus on this kind of early intervention."

As part of the Allen review, Nottingham was designated "an early intervention city", but the average age of the young people involved in interventions in the area is 14. "I wouldn’t really call that early intervention," Hosking says.

Primary prevention

Despite the hint of criticism, he insists he is not against programmes that work with older children and young people, arguing there is simply a need for much more emphasis on what he calls "primary prevention".

"There’s nothing wrong with remedial programmes," he explains. "As a criminologist, I do remedial programmes with teenagers myself, and that can be very beneficial. But it’s nowhere near as effective as it would have been if I had got into their lives when they were babies and stopped all the damage being done. We should have a proper balance in which primary prevention is treated as a high priority. Unfortunately that seldom happens."

As a result of working with Wave, the Scottish government has committed to devise a national primary prevention strategy for children. But Hosking is less hopeful about the prospect of the English government adopting any such policy. "The current government has made a decision that any policies of this nature should be formed at local level," he says.

"So we have the challenge of persuading a wide number of local authorities to adopt this type of strategy. One of our major goals this year is to get local authorities to do that."

He recognises the scale of the challenge ahead. "Local authorities are so crippled by budget cuts and staff changes, it is very hard to get them to give adequate attention to primary prevention because they’re fire-fighting," he says.

"I would like to see a ringfenced grant from central government to local authorities that says this money must be spent on primary prevention. But there’s not even a guarantee that the current early intervention grant is going to be spent on children. I’ve heard of cases where it’s spent on libraries, for example."

However, the Wave Trust is working closely with the Department for Education and Department of Health in developing govern­ment policy for children from conception to the age of two. Hosking is co-chairing a working group to examine a host of issues from workforce training and service commissioning to promoting better mental health and the economics of early years investment.

The charity is also running conferences this year for local authorities, health and wellbeing boards and third sector organisations to make the case for primary prevention. "We’re trying to get that message out there," he says. "We want to end this year by being in partnership with a number of local authorities that are adopting true primary prevention strategies."

He recalls one of Wave’s landmark success stories, as an example of how the momentum behind early intervention has grown.

Having gathered evidence on successful children’s services interventions from across the world, he tried to persuade the Department of Health to pilot a US early intervention programme called Nurse Family Partnership in 2001.

"Initially, we were more or less told to go away and mind our own business," he says. "But in 2004, Croydon Police gave us a grant to do something about violence. We said we wanted to spend the £5,000 on trying to get Nurse Family Partnership into the UK."

Hosking flew to Colorado to meet the founder of the programme, Professor David Olds. After a week of negotiations, he got the green light to try and pilot the scheme in the UK. He took his plans to officials at the Cabinet Office and finally got the backing to run the scheme here. Now called Family Nurse Partnership, the Department of Health-funded programme is benefiting 13,000 children.

"It is far more effective to prevent harm being done to a child than to try to repair the damage after it’s done," Hosking says. "But that isn’t the way we do things in Britain. The system basically allows children to be abused and neglected and then steps in much too late after children have been damaged. We want government to adopt a strategy of stepping in before children are harmed."

THE WAVE TRUST

• Its goal is to drive a 70 per cent reduction in child abuse and neglect in the UK by 2030
• The charity was responsible for bringing the Family Nurse Partnership Programme from the US to the UK
• It also imported a Canadian programme called Roots of Empathy, which uses babies to teach parenting skills to schoolchildren and reduce bullying
• George Hosking was a senior adviser to Graham Allen’s early intervention review
• Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith credits the Wave Trust as a major influence on the Centre for Social Justice’s children and families policy
• Sir Richard Bowlby, son of John Bowlby, who pioneered research into early attachment relationships between parents and children, is strategic adviser to the charity