The government has started setting out its policies around integrating early years services and improving support for families, recently announcing a further £126 million in funding, on top of the £69 million already dedicated in the Budget, for Family Hubs.

There are currently around 400 Family Hubs now open in England, spread across 75 local authorities. Intended as ‘one-stop shops’ they bring together a range of different services making it easier for families with very young children to get the support they need, building on the foundations that Sure Start established in 1999.

But although the SureStart programme has been touted as a success recently, one of its unintended legacies was its lack of data - which made the evaluation more difficult.

This time around, if councils want to ensure they don’t find themselves facing the same difficulties - and be able to measure what actually works - they’ll need to make sure they have integrated data systems.

That means getting the infrastructure for collecting and sharing data right from the very start. But this is a challenge: the Family Hubs programme in England is only a couple of years old and is still finding its feet.

Luckily however there are lessons it can take from the devolved nations with longer standing early years programmes.

Flying Start is an early years programme established by the Welsh government in 2007. It supports disadvantaged parents with children under four years old, bringing together enhanced support from health visitors, part-time childcare and access to parenting programmes primarily providing health advice.

Last year, Nesta worked with Cardiff City Council, mapping the data from their Flying Start offer.

Cardiff’s service is already highly valued by parents, but our partnership showed there were opportunities to use their data to make it even more targeted and help to utilise their resources more efficiently.

The project surfaced three key risks that can arise when services have been built without a data driven mindset from the outset:

• Information overwhelm - as repeated, sometimes contrasting, pieces of information and referrals come in from different sources.

• Families being missed by provision when there is no administrative data held about them - this is especially true where access is based on postcode, as is the case for Flying Start. This can lead to whole geographic areas being excluded from data sets and disadvantaged families living in otherwise illegible postcodes being overlooked.

• Families not getting access to the right provision - despite knowing that some families need more or different support (e.g. first time parents) that level of data not being captured or accessible - this makes targeting resources harder, as it’s impossible to know where and what extra support to give.

Through our project we identified three solutions for the key challenges outlined.

Though initially intended to empower Cardiff City Council to improve their service offer, we think the solutions are relevant much more widely, and if applied to Family Hubs could allow them to start their data journey effectively from the very beginning, setting them up to be a success in an increasingly connected system.

Solution 1: Build a single system

Children and families don’t live in vacuums and neither should their data.

In order to unlock the full potential of early years data we need the integration of data across all of its services.

Moving to a single system prevents the creation of data silos, but we found that Cardiff's existing data management didn’t reflect Flying Start’s holistic service offer.

Often the data people needed already existed in another part of the early years ecosystem - it was just a question of sharing that data with the other teams.

For example, Cardiff’s health visiting team conducted a range of speech, language and communication assessments. These could be shared with their childcare team enabling them to better prepare their support for children, knowing in advance any potential development areas to focus on.

Though Cardiff is now moving to a shared system this isn’t possible everywhere.

Time and time again our research across the UK has found that data sharing across ‘separate’ systems is hindered by the procurement of systems that lack interoperability - and this is still the case in many local authorities.

Solution 2: Understand the importance of relationships but don’t rely on them

In non-integrated early years provision - where information isn’t being exchanged between systems - the data sharing that does occur often relies on the personal relationships between professionals, with individuals relaying important information to each other.

When, for whatever reason, that might not happen, families can experience a lack of continuity of care, something even less desirable in a supposedly holistic service such as Flying Start.

Our research has found that this experience is shared by a number of local authorities, and not just limited to Wales and Flying Start.

But it’s clear that this variability could be evened out by applying a ‘data mindset’. It should become the norm that data is shared between service providers rather than relying on the formation of personal connections between professionals as a way to transmit information.

Solution 3: Plan for evaluation by collecting every family’s outcome data

Cardiff’s Flying Start already collects data on attendance at parenting interventions and has information about who and isn’t accessing it as a programme. This provided a fantastic foundation from a data point of view.

However, as we said earlier, Flying Start also demonstrated an important lesson easily overlooked - that the data on families outside your service is as crucial as the data on the families within the service.

Without the information on families outside of the services, it’s hard to effectively evaluate an offer, something which Sure Start struggled to do.

In our project we developed ways to utilise non-Flying Start data to provide a useful benchmark and additional material for the assessment of outcomes across communities. This helped to understand the impact of Flying Start within the wider population of families, not just those accessing the service.

With this in mind, we must be wary of shifts towards a less outcome focused approach, as we could lose the ability to evaluate these programmes. Without community-wide outcomes data, decision makers cannot take informed decisions on commissioning and decommissioning as they have no evidence of what works.

Despite these challenges - importantly not unique to Cardiff or Wales - Flying Start is an excellent initiative that is clearly valued by the families which should be celebrated as England sets up its Family Hubs.

However, as we see repeatedly in our work at Nesta, data usage is hindering its effectiveness and preventing it from being the fully holistic programme it sets out to be - an insight valuable for any integrated early years system.

As more Family Hubs are starting, it’s incredibly important to learn from programmes, such as Flying Start, that are already well established and put in place data systems that work for families, professionals and local councils. This would ensure better outcomes for the most disadvantaged children in both England and Wales, and across the UK as a whole.