Professor Paul Downes:

Yes. Early intervention is of course key. We are trying to prevent problems getting worse. It depends on the scale of the trauma. Certainly you can alleviate the educational impacts of the trauma or adversity through these supports. I am referring to lowered concentration, low motivation, peer conflict and conflict with teachers. Suspension and expulsion is another one. We suspend over 13,000 students every year. Many of them would benefit from specialist one-to-one counselling supports to keep them in the school system. It would certainly help to alleviate so many of the negative outcomes we see arising. The whole area of prevention is very hard to quantify because by definition you are stopping something happening and so you cannot necessarily measure it as precisely but that does not undermine the importance of prevention and early intervention.