This report examines the impact of Preparing for Life (PFL), an Irish prenatally commencing home visiting programme, ten years after the intervention ended. The intervention involved regular visits from trained home visitors from pregnancy until school entry to support parents around child development and parenting. Previous reports of the PFL trial found that the programme was effective in boosting children’s cognitive skills, with smaller effects on some dimensions of health and socio-emotional skills. The Age 14 Follow-up found that the programme has a sustained and long-term effect on children’s cognitive development, with large effect sizes of 0.70 standard deviations (SDs). Significant effects were also found on working memory, attention, and educational expectations, however there were relatively few effects on health or socio-emotional outcomes. There was some evidence that the programme reduced children’s waist-to-height ratio and improved the parent-child relationship. All results were estimated using permutation-based hypothesis testing which accounts for attrition using inverse probability weighting and multiple hypothesis testing using the stepdown procedure. While 43% of the original sample participated at the Age 14 Follow-up, the high and low treatment groups were still balanced on all key baseline characteristics. This is one of the few experimental home visiting programmes that tracks participants into adolescence and finds evidence that the intervention continues to have a significant impact on important dimensions of children’s skills.

[See also, data from PFL on ISSDA database Preparing for Life collection: Evaluation of the Preparing for Life early childhood intervention (PFL), 2008 - 2015]