This report presents the findings from Transforming Early Years, a project which showed how Radical Efficiency can work in practice.

Key findings:

• Radical
 Efficiency involves redesigning public services to make them more efficient. Service
 providers 
need to
 explore 
the 
challenge
 their new
 service
 is
 trying to tackle 
before
 they
 define
 possible 
solutions.
• Staff and members of the community benefit from participating in decision making. 
• Parents
 who volunteered in the Transforming Early Years project by becoming peer supporters benefited as much as those they were supporting.
• Cost savings
 will
 accrue
if new
 services reduce the 
number
 of paid
 staff 
and 
increase the
number
 of 
volunteers, while improving
 outcomes 
for 
children. 
• Service
 providers 
need
 support
 to
 consider
 ways to reduce costs, and need to 
develop plans
 for
 decommissioning
 old, failing 
services. 

Radical Efficiency holds out the promise of different and better public services, provided at a lower cost.

Transforming Early Years, which was a practical demonstration of the principles of Radical Efficiency, set out to deliver on this promise. Over a period of 18 months, teams of early years service providers worked intensively to redesign aspects of their early years offer, at the same time as reducing costs, with an ambitious target of 30% savings in their first year of operation.

This short report summarises the findings of the Transforming Early Years project which ran from January 2010 to July 2011.

Authors:

Caireen Goddard and Julie Temperley