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In announcing her ministerial line-up, Jacinda Ardern, our new Prime Minister, announced that" of course we support early intervention. What we want to do is see if that is truly what the investment approach was doing"(New Zealand Herald, 2017). Note, the efficacy of early intervention is not a concern, rather the question of whether that is what is being done. Gillies, Edwards, and Horsley (2017), challenge the taken-for-granted assumption that early intervention in children's lives is ideal, and detail the confluence of science, policy and neoliberalism that has informed the booming early intervention industry in the United Kingdom. They detail both how we have come to see early intervention as pivotal, and the results of research into what social workers think about such interventions.

Gillies at al., problematise the idea that certain forms of parenting, particularly those associated with lower classes, have a biological …