A greater understanding of the huge impact the first five years of life has on a child's development is causing a major rethink of pre-school education.

About 80 per cent of brain development occurs from the time a baby is in the womb to the age of three, and leading medical experts say it is wrong to expect the education system to fix behavioural problems later in schools.

They say targeted interventions for at-risk children before they reach school can help drastically increase their chances of success later in life.

The research is fuelling calls for governments - state and federal - to ensure pre-school is taken as seriously as primary and high school education.

A child's environment affects how many connections in the human brain remain stable, influencing their ability to control emotions, language and many other critical areas.

Judy Willis, a teacher and neurologist, says magnetic resonance techniques that map the brain show differences in function of children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

"In the brains of kids exposed to things such as stress in utero, deprivation of nutrition, damaging substances from alcohol to drugs, we can see that their brain looks OK, but its not functioning the way other brains do," she said.

Dr Willis says scientists are only now realising how powerful emotions are in affecting brain development.

"The access to the highest brain, or the emotional system, is very stress reactive," she said.

"The highest brain is the part of the brain where memories are formed, and the part of the brain where judgement analysis and prioritising happens, and it's the part of the brain that's able to analyse and think and reflect before acting.

"But stress blocks off our access to our ability to reflect. So when stressors get high and someone has not been taught to recognise that and how it affects access to the higher brain, the response will come from the lower brain, and be one of fight, flight or freeze."

John Boffa, a GP and public medical health officer at the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, says babies in the womb can be severely affected by stress.

"If mothers in utero are living in fear or in violent relationships, are stressed, then the baby will, if you like, develop in a way where it's expecting from birth onwards to be in an environment of stress," he said.

"That has huge implications for their life-long health and well-being.

"Neuroscience is telling us now that by age three, 80 per cent of brain development has occurred, by age four, 92 per cent of brain development has occurred.

"We've got to work with children and families well before pre-school, from pregnancy through to two - they are the critical years."

'Against the odds'

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Watch Duration: 15 minutes 22 seconds 15 m Extended interview with John Boffa ( Suzanne Smith )

Dr Boffa says that if a child lives in a vulnerable environment, the effect on their brain can be devastating.

"If you're struggling against the odds, if you're growing up with violence, if you're growing up in a family where your needs are not being properly met, perhaps where you've sat in front of the television too much, where you don't hear a lot of conversational language in the house, where you haven't got an effective routine - these sorts of things have a huge impact on your development and they overwhelm your genetic potential," he said.

At one centre, three-year-olds and four-year-olds come from Alice Springs suburbs and town camps.

They are part of the readiness program, funded out of the Northern Territory intervention and Stronger Futures policy.

More than 300 children of this age group live in Alice Springs and the congress aims to get every one into the pre-school program for three hours each day.

"They actually start blossoming and smiling and talking to us and we get lots of hugs," pre-school teacher Bronwyn Schmull said.

"As you say, a lot of them are coming from homes where there's a lot of unpredictability and they may not feel safe."

Research is also backing claims that leaving intervention until high school makes it much harder to achieve long-lasting behavioural change.

Dr Willis says while the brain's ability to adapt continues throughout life, the older children are the harder it is to effect change.

"The rate of improvement will be much faster the earlier you intervene, and it will be taking advantage of the brain's natural more rapid development the younger someone is," she said.

"The later the intervention, the slower the improvement, and the longer the catch-up will be.

"And it takes an enormous motivation in a child to work through that. It's so hard as a child to face abilities others have that you don't have, and to believe they can get them."

With this in mind, every pregnant Indigenous woman in Alice Springs under 28 weeks gets their own nurse until the child is five years old.

The integration of health and education services is a big factor in this program's success.

Problems like hearing impairment are picked up straight away.

Shaping brains

Children who attend the centre are taught techniques to help improve their mindfulness. ( ABC: Tim Leslie )

Sheryl Batchelor, a former Indigenous high school teacher, manages a special cognitive program known as Shaping Brains, south of Brisbane.

It is run by the Benevolent Society and devised by some of America's best neuroscientists.

The children here have been referred from local schools or through the centre's health programs.

Nine-year-old Caitlin Dixon has been coming to the special early-year centre for over a year now.

When she first arrived at the age of eight, she could not read and had severe behavioural problems. She did not get the help she needed at a younger age.

"She kept touching other children and taking their things and it was like her brain was telling her to go from one thing to another and she couldn't concentrate on anything that she was doing," Ms Batchelor said.

To improve Caitlin's ability to control her emotions and improve her memory and be mindful of her behaviour, Ms Batchelor introduced her to Cogmed, a special computer program.

"This program helps kids really concentrate and really focus their attention on listening and using their eyes to see what's on the screen and therefore increasing their capacity to learn," she said.

Caitlin is now reading and her behaviour is calmer and more rational.

"By the end of the first week I could see improvement in her ability to calm herself when she wasn't winning the game or whatever. So it was a noticeable improvement straightaway," her mother said.

Ms Batchelor says this project shows 15 hours per week of pre-school education from the age of three should be free and universal and include first-class neuroscience-based programs.

"I left teaching because I felt really helpless. I felt like I was hitting a brick wall every day I turned up to school and I really felt that the system was letting a lot of these children down," she said.

One longitudinal study in the United States found that children who had good early childhood educational experiences were more likely to graduate from high school, have a job, have higher average earnings and lower levels of crime.

School Education and Early Childhood Minister Peter Garrett says the Federal Government is committed to universal access to educational services for children in the year before they enter school.

"We want them to have 15 hours of high-quality early childhood education and care for 40 weeks a year and that's to be delivered by a university-trained teacher," Mr Garrett told Lateline.

"And we've spent nearly ... a billion dollars ... working with the states to bring that into play."

Sorry, this video has expired Government committed to early education ( Emma Alberici )