In his "Plan for Change" speech last week, the prime minister confirmed that early years will be the government’s key milestone for its mission to break the link between life chances and family background.

By 2028, the government wants the proportion of children in England who are “school ready” to rise to 75%, up from 68% this year.

Pushing up the level by just seven percentage points - roughly an additional 50,000 children - may look modest, but it’s not.

With limited scope for additional public investment following a decade of disinvestment from preventative early childhood services, an early education and childcare sector in crisis, and over one in three children under the age 4 living in relative poverty, the government will face real challenges in achieving this target.

But I dare believe that it will be possible - if there's a sharp focus on scaling what we know already works, adopting a multi-pronged approach to support children at home and in their early education, and committing to invest money where it delivers the most impact for children’s outcomes.

The act of setting an ambitious, yet not completely unrealistic target, will hopefully act as a mobilising force for all layers of society to work in partnership and set the country in train to reach even more ambitious goals for our children in the longer-term.

First comes first, what exactly is this target?

The measure used in the government’s definition of “school readiness” is based on the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP).

Every year, reception teachers in England assess children across a number of learning goals. A child is deemed “school ready” or reaching a “good level of development” (GLD) if they're at the expected level for 12 early learning goals within five areas of learning: literacy, mathematics, physical development, communication and language, and personal, social and emotional development.

While the EYFSP is imperfect (as is any measure of early childhood development or school readiness), the fact that the government is adopting a holistic measure of child development as one of its main targets is significant.

It recognises that children’s life chances depend not only on their emerging academic skills, but also on their physical and mental health - and implicitly that the responsibility for improving them extends much beyond education.

Among the roughly 600,000 children that finished reception in a state-funded school in England this year, approximately two thirds were deemed “school ready”. But among the 200,000 who were not, economically disadvantaged children and children with special education needs (SEN) were disproportionately represented.

This means that raising levels of school readiness - in the long-term - also has to be about closing the disadvantage and SEN gap.

However, the government's need to bring about results by the next election could create an incentive to focus on bringing the 50,000 children in England closest to being school ready “over the line”.

On average these children will be less likely to be from lower-income backgrounds and/or have special education needs than those further from the threshold, thus creating a risk that inequalities increase in the short-term.

Such an outcome would be completely at odds with the government’s mission to break the link between life chances and family background.

Mitigating this risk could be done by having specific sub-targets around the outcomes of disadvantaged and SEN children and keeping these groups front and centre in the government’s strategy.

As with any target, there’ll certainly be some debate over whether this target is too ambitious, or not ambitious enough.

How ambitious it really is depends on how many children would be reaching GLD in the next 3 years in its absence.

To get an idea of that hypothetical or counterfactual scenario, we can look at past trends - though changes in the definition of GLD and the effect of the pandemic don’t make it particularly easy.

Between 2023 and 2024, the proportion of “school ready” children in England only increased by 0.5 percentage points. Between 2022 and 2023, it increased by 2 percentage points - though likely to be at least partly driven by a “rebound” effect from Covid.

In the three years before Covid, the proportion of children reaching GLD was actually over 70% and increasing at about 0.4 percentage points per year. However, the way GLD is measured has since changed, limiting the scope for direct comparison.

Even if one was willing to optimistically assume that the proportion of children reaching GLD was going to increase at the rate of 1 percentage point a year, achieving Labour’s 2028 target would still require doubling the number of additional children who are "school ready".

So whilst pushing up the proportion of "school ready" children by 7 percentage points over four years may initially look modest, it really isn’t.

The target is also particularly challenging because of the current economic and social circumstances the country is in at the moment.

More than one in three (36%) of children in families where the youngest child is under five are in relative poverty. The early education and childcare sector is in crisis. Spending on early childhood services in England, which were once delivered via Sure Start, is even lower than it was 20 years ago. And given the state of its public finances, the government has limited scope for additional public investment.

Yet, for the sake of children growing up in this country, reaching this target must become a reality.

That will require a strategy that's laser focused on impact, prioritising the scaling of what we know already works, supporting children in their early education and supporting parents and caregivers at home, and investing or crowding in funding towards what will deliver the most impact for children’s outcomes.

Encouragingly, in his Plan for Change, the prime minister highlighted the key areas of public services that will need to function at their best to deliver progress on early childhood outcomes, from health visiting to early education quality and integrated family support.

The act of setting an ambitious, but not completely unrealistic target, will hopefully be energising for society but the government will need to set a clear plan for how it hopes to achieve these changes so that the third sector, philanthropists, businesses, and individuals can coalesce around it and contribute to delivering it.

First, the new target should provide an impetus to push for the scaling of programmes and practices that have a good evidence base.

After decades of research, there’s a strong arsenal of effective, evidence based interventions that we know can support children, parents and teachers and improve children’s outcomes.

Scaling these interventions isn’t always straightforward, but starting off with interventions for children in reception could be easiest since schools provide an infrastructure that enables scaling.

This could include further expanding provision of the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI), which has been shown to help children make an average 3-5 months of additional progress in language and improve their behaviour - and it is currently delivered to tens of thousands of children.

There's also potential to utilise one-to-one tutoring for children requiring greater support and text-based support for parents to support children’s learning at home, which has been proven to improve the early learning outcomes of children aged 4-5 in America and is now being tested in the UK.

A challenge to scaling these programmes, especially in schools where a large number of children need interventions like NELI and tutoring, will be teachers not having the capacity to deliver this support in addition to their existing teaching responsibilities.

But there are creative ways to overcome such challenges.

Organisations like Thrive at Five, for example, have brokered partnerships between local schools and universities to train students from education courses to deliver the interventions. Countries like Sweden and Canada have a history of promoting intergenerational learning programs, whereby schools recruit retired teachers and older adults, including grandparents, to volunteer in classrooms and support learning.

However, whilst a push for scaling evidence-based interventions could look like a great fix, it will be important not to under-estimate the systemic barriers that currently prevent that.

Parenting support programmes are a good example. The government could encourage local authorities to commission the most well evidenced programmes, for example, by subsidising their cost. However, without also investing in the local capability and data needed to adapt these interventions to local need (and implement them to a high quality) these programmes could fail to reach and impact those who would benefit most.

Currently in England, 83% of three year-olds spend an average of 23 hours in an early years setting. At earlier ages formal childcare use is lower: 58% of two-year-olds and 38% of one-year-olds attend a formal setting.

But these numbers are expected to increase if (and that it is still a big if) parents can find places to take up the new entitlement of 30 hours of free childcare for all children of working parents in England (from the age of 9 months).

To reach the GLD target, every hour a child spends in a setting must count towards their development. The most important determinant of that will be the skills and professional development of the early years workforce.

The sector is currently facing a workforce crisis - with challenges around recruiting and retaining workers who don’t feel financially compensated or socially valued for the work they are doing.

Nurseries that serve more disadvantaged communities, where children are more likely not to reach a good level of development, are under the greatest financial pressures due to their limited ability to pass on costs to their client base. The quality of the care on offer in these areas is often worse as a result.

It's difficult to imagine a solution to this quagmire that wouldn’t involve involve a review of funding rates to ensure they reflect the cost of provision more adequately, and for funding to be more generously adjusted for levels of deprivation and special education needs. A possible and quite obvious mechanism for the latter could be an increase in the Early Years Pupil Premium.

A review of the current funding system would also need to account for the true economic cost of the workforce's continuous professional development - that is the cost of the time, planning and leadership it takes to support an early educator to learn and integrate new learning into daily practice.

But funding is just one barrier to professional development in the early years.

At present, the early years qualifications and professional development market is an unregulated wild west. The lack of a national career progression map contributes to making early education an unappealing profession among younger generations and wastes time and energy spent searching and attending ineffective programmes.

Lessons could be learned from the carefully constructed school teacher development system, which stands in stark contrast to the early years.

An expert advisory group – akin to that which advised on teacher reforms – could be tasked to develop new frameworks for qualifications. In turn, these frameworks would serve as a basis for the government to launch a procurement initiative for lead training providers, including universities, charities and private providers. A network of delivery partners could be established for national coverage, potentially using existing structures such as teaching school hubs or early years stronger practice hubs.

Finally, but perhaps most importantly, reaching the target will require putting families at the centre of the strategy.

Parents and the home environment play an enormous role in shaping the pupils, workers, parents, and citizens we eventually become.

Services that once integrated parenting support, antenatal and postnatal health services, and financial inclusion in Sure Start one-stop-shops have been shown to have long-term effects on the health, education and behavioural outcomes of children, especially disadvantaged ones.

Yet, early childhood services have suffered massive disinvestment over the years following the removal of ring-fenced funding for Sure Start and austerity cuts, and many Sure Start children’s centres have closed.

However, the Start for Life and Family Hubs programme introduced in 2021 has been a hugely welcome initiative to reinvigorate joined-up working in early childhood, and it was great that both featured in the prime minister’s Plan for Change.

To rebuild an integrated family support system that truly delivers for children’s outcomes via one-stop-shops, the central government will need to wrestle with a number of important trade-offs in the design of the policy.

A key one will be around the level of autonomy it's willing to give local areas in deciding how to use the funding and the levels of monitoring and accountability for impact on key outcomes it will demand in return.

Another one will be around the degree of universalism it wants the Start for Life and Family Hubs programmes to have. Currently, Family Hubs funding only extends to 75 local authorities in England, chosen on the basis of their level of deprivation. Yet, there are millions of disadvantaged children living in the other local authorities too.

A conversation about funding will be inevitable. With an average of around £100m funding per annum over the past 3 years however, Family Hubs funding can really only do so much against the vertiginous decline of spending in early childhood services.

A further expansion of funding to support Family Hubs located in disadvantaged areas in the other local authorities seems a natural priority. But if the programme does not expand further into more affluent areas, a key question will be around how to ensure that disadvantaged children living in affluent areas still access and benefit from early childhood services.

Unsurprisingly a lot of the things mentioned above cost money. Reaching this ambitious target will be a lot harder without much extra cash to spend and when workforce shortages are a major barrier to delivering much needed publicly funded services.

The case for extra funding in the early years is not particularly easy, following the previous government’s 2023 Budget reform to expand the free entitlement and this government’s commitment to stick to it. After all, early years education is one of the few areas of welfare spending that has increased since 2010-11 while so many others have decreased. By 2026-27, the government is expected to spend over £8bn on childcare entitlements in England, a 100% increase from 2023-24 and a 400% increase from 2010-11.

Yet, if the government is serious about achieving its school readiness milestone, it will have to commit to spend money where it delivers the most impact for children’s outcomes.

If the scope for additional funding is limited, it will essentially have three non-mutually exclusive options: increase its efficiency at delivering key services (e.g. through greater use of AI to support health visitors and early educators), crowd in private or philanthropic money, and/or revise the distribution of funding across the different areas that have the potential to improve school readiness to maximize impact on its missions.

While all options should be considered, the last one will feel politically trickier but ought to be considered.

Currently, spending on the free entitlement is eight times higher than spending on early childhood services in England. By 2026-27, it will be over 16 times that, assuming spending services stays at current level.

While the actual impact of the new entitlements on parental employment and childcare remains to be seen, initial projections suggest that by the late 2020s, the vast majority of childcare hours funded through the new entitlements would have happened anyway, with families paying out of pocket.

While these families will certainly enjoy some extra cash, the new entitlements may do little to improve the outcomes of their children, many of whom would be likely to be "school ready" anyway.

The antagonism between the current funding distribution - between early childhood services and early education, and across the family income distribution - and the evidence about the impact these services can have for disadvantaged children feels just too great to ignore.

While the government could still commit to an almost universal childcare offer in the longer-term, slowing down the pace of the new entitlement’s roll out could create some breathing room to address the workforce crisis, ensure that high-quality early education is accessible and accessed starting in disadvantaged areas, and increase investment in universal and targeted services, from midwifery, health visiting, parenting support and Family Hubs in the meantime.

An ambitious, yet not totally implausible short-term goal like the one the prime minister just set for the early years feels exciting for the sense of urgency and accountability that it creates.

A laser focus on impact in the short-term will hopefully mean accelerating the scaling of policy and practice that we feel confident about.

But we should never lose sight of the broader mission this milestone aims to drive the country toward: a society where all children develop to their full potential in the early years and later, regardless of family background.

To achieve that, it will be important to also use the next few years to be very intentional about driving innovation and evidence generation where it's needed most and to continuously test and learn on the way to reach an even more ambitious target a few years later.