Modelling Long-Term Childhood Policy Impacts on Health, Wellbeing and Inequality
The ActEarly modelling team aims to create a “really useful engine” for childhood policy evaluation, which provides credible information about both the long-term benefits and public cost savings. Our model will take short-term effect estimates from childhood intervention studies and extrapolate them into the future to predict the lifetime health, wellbeing and inequality impacts for different children in different circumstances. This will allow comparisons of value-for-money between different kinds of childhood investment at different ages across different parts of government. The modelling team includes researchers at the University of York (Richard Cookson, Ieva Skarda), UCL (George Ploubidis, Eric Brunner, Aase Villadsen), LSE (Miqdad Asaria) and Leeds (Mark Mon Williams) and we are liaising with diverse ActEarly stakeholders to ensure our microsimulation platform is able to produce findings that are as credible, meaningful and useful as possible. The team are currently designing the childhood microsimulation model “LifeSim Childhood”, which models the evolution of key developmental, educational, health and wellbeing outcomes between ages 0-17, for each child in a cohort of children born in the UK. The next steps will involve linking these childhood outcomes to later adulthood social, economic health and wellbeing outcomes, and applying this model to evaluate ActEarly childhood interventions.
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