Nesta’s fairer start mission has advocated for improved data within the early years, highlighting how the siloed nature of the services and their data impacts our understanding of the holistic picture of a child’s journey. Data sharing relies often on individual relationships between practitioners, which means some services are working without the full picture. 

In the second year of our Fairer Start Local innovation partnership, City of York Council linked data across education, health and funding for the first time, enabling us to have a holistic view across children’s engagement with support services for the first 0-5 years of their life. In the third and final year of the partnership, we wanted to use this linked dataset to its full potential and embed a tool that York Council could use going forward to make informed decisions about where to target resources and support based on the developmental needs of the children. Making the dataset anonymous meant the level of targeted support could range from settings to larger geographical areas (eg, wards), depending on the existing delivery model used by services within York.

Although this data tool was designed for use in York, we recognise that the challenges York faces are not unique. As a result, we have considered the potential of scaling the tool and opportunities to embed it across other local authorities. We did this through restricting the datasets we used to the most common ones across local authorities: 

1. the developmental assessment data (from the two-year-old health review), and 
2. funding data. 

Both datasets form the core part of the dashboard, and are the only two required for the full functionality of the tool. Additional data was embedded for York, but these are not necessary for the data tool to work. We also constrained our initial user base to only universally delivered services across local authorities, such as health visiting or early childhood education and care settings.

The project started in March 2024, running for a full year, and from now on Nesta will provide light-touch support to York to maintain the tool.

Through user interviews, workshops and rapid prototyping, we focused on:

• the Early Years and Childcare Quality Improvement Team as our key users
• the delivery of support packages to childcare settings as a key decision for York to improve through the data tool. 

The Quality Improvement team is often the interface between settings and other early-years services, for example the Public Health team or Portage. This means they are one of the most direct ways York can improve children’s outcomes by providing access to a range of different types of support. However, they don’t receive any data on children’s developmental needs from settings or from other services, which reduces the amount of proactive support they can deliver. It again relies on information being passed along via individual relationships, which can lead to gaps and inefficiencies. 

The linked dataset enabled us to view children’s developmental assessment data at a setting level, so the Quality Improvement team could quickly view the challenges facing settings and provide support. 

To fully harness the linked data, we designed a tool that translated its core parts – health review assessment data and notifications about potential special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) – into actionable insights for the Quality Improvement team, ensuring that support could be both targeted and efficient.

We identified three main focus areas of the tool, which will support the Quality Improvement team to improve and target the support provided to children.

1. Listing settings based on developmental need 

The Quality Improvement team is often putting in place an intervention, or directing other services, that can support a child’s specific developmental need. Currently, they don’t know which settings would be best placed to receive this support so the data tool identifies a list of settings based on chosen indicators. For example, if a speech, language and communication intervention was in development and they were unsure which setting had the most children who had a speech, language and communication developmental need, they could select the Ages and Stages Questionnaire, third edition (ASQ-3): Communication domain and WellComm results. The data tool would highlight settings which have the most children who are not meeting expectations in these two assessments.

2. Clustering similar settings

Not all support is specific to a particular domain but may be a more general type of training, for example, a programme which improves gross motor skills compared to one around recruitment and retention or safeguarding. Currently, training is often delivered on a one-to-one basis, but if this could be delivered to groups of settings it would carve out time to deliver more targeted support. 

In the data tool, we ran a clustering algorithm which grouped together settings that share:

• a similar profile of need across all of the ASQ domains
• notifications about potential SEND
• a number of missing health review assessments
• the WellComm assessment. 

This means settings that generally have a higher level of need across the board can have more tailored training which considers the profile of their settings, and vice versa for those that have a lower level of need.

3. Individual setting level results

There is still a need to individually support settings, with the Quality Improvement team visiting at least once a term to all settings in York. For these visits, they can view the individual settings page, an additional webpage we developed which will share the latest information about the children’s development. 

They can see: 

• the trajectory of children’s ASQs from 9-12 to 24-30 months 
• the individual ASQ-3 24-30 months domain scores
• the WellComm results
• the number of children missing an ASQ 
• how the setting compares to the York average for the number of children with a potential SEND. 

This allows the Quality Improvement team to prepare for meetings with settings, share the data with them to discuss options for supporting the children and consider any specialist support the team can provide. By focusing on these areas, the tool empowers the Quality Improvement team to make more informed decisions, streamline their workflow, and ultimately enhance the quality of early-years support across York.

The data tool is now up and running in York, with a short period of bug fixes and improvements before Nesta moves to a more hands-off role. The Business Intelligence team in York are going to update the data held in the tool termly, allowing the Quality Improvement team and other support services involved around the setting meetings to look at the data and plan for the term ahead.

With this tool in place, York’s early-years teams now have access to crucial data that was previously unavailable, enabling them to provide more effective and timely support to early years settings. As the system is embedded into regular practice, it has the potential to drive lasting improvements in early-years outcomes across the city.

The York data tool has created the opportunity for more data-driven decision making within the early years, breaking down the barriers between services and enabling multi-agency working. We will spend the coming year supporting York on their usage of the tool and evaluating its impact on the Quality Improvement team’s ways of working and ability to proactively provide tailored support. 

We originally hoped we could scale the tool, but most local authorities’ data infrastructure is not as robust as York’s, which will be a barrier to widely rolling out the full tool. In particular, linking funding data and health data is a challenge as they currently sit within different data systems.  We hope that developing a unique child ID will make it easier to combine the two datasets, but it would be challenging for Nesta to individually recreate the linkage across local authorities without the necessary data infrastructure. Our next steps are reviewing which parts of the tool to scale, while supporting improvements to data infrastructure in the early years in more local authorities.

Our work in York has demonstrated the power of linked early-years data in driving targeted support and improving outcomes for children. While full-scale replication may not yet be feasible in all local authorities, this project has laid the groundwork for future advancements in early-years data infrastructure. By sharing our learnings and refining scalable elements of the tool, we aim to continue driving progress toward a more data-informed approach to early childhood support across the UK.