Socio-psycho-educational resource (SPER) centres were first established in Western Australia in 1977 for the purpose of educating and managing primary school-aged children with severe behaviour problems. Each centre functioned as a separate unit located on the campus of a host primary school. Selected children were initially withdrawn from their regular schools to attend the SPER centre where they received a specialised program aimed at decreasing their problematic behaviour. The host school assisted re-entry of SPER centre children into the mainstream by providing part-time integration within its regular classes prior to eventual return to the regular school. In 1988 the Coolbellup SPER Centre began to replace this withdrawal service model with an outreach model. By 1991 the preferred method was to deliver intervention programs within a child's home school. Data revealed that the outreach model was able to service in excess of three times as many children each year as the withdrawal model, with only a minimal increase in teaching staff and with an associated reduction in the length of waiting lists. Post hoc evaluation of student records demonstrated high levels of success for the outreach model, based on teacher ratings of improvement in rule following, peer interactions, and overall school behaviour and performance. Other benefits of the outreach program are discussed.

Although much has been written about the need for prevention of anxiety disorders in children, there has been a marked absence of empirical research to evaluate the effectiveness of such programs. This paper suggests that there is now sufficient evidence to identify risk and protective factors for the development of childhood anxiety disorders. Early childhood temperament, negative life events, and children's coping styles are suggested to play a significant role. Acting in association with these variables are parental behaviours that serve to model, prompt, and reinforce anxious behaviour and emphasise the threatening nature of events. Our knowledge of these causal variables enables us to identify children at risk for the development of anxiety problems and highlights variables that should be targets of change in prevention programs. Indicated prevention is designed to disrupt the trajectory towards the development of clinical levels of psychological disorder. This paper describes an “indicated” preventive program for children identified as being at risk for the development of anxiety disorders given evidence of mild anxious symptomatology.