The three-year Fairer Start Local partnership brings together Nesta’s innovation mindset and multidisciplinary teams with detailed, on-the-ground experience of the early years from local authorities, to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children. The second year of the partnership with York coincided with the development of the Raise York family hubs. This project supported York’s family hubs team to help make more informed decisions about where the children in York could use the enhanced support.

It was also an opportunity to develop a linked dataset across health, education and other local authority-held data. For the first time, York could see the journey of a child through the whole early years system, tracking their outcomes with assessments at 9-12 months, 27-30 months and 4-5 years. In addition, they could see how the demographics of the children changed their journey and impacted on their outcomes.

By demonstrating the advantages of having a linked dataset, York has started to put in place the infrastructure that provides access to this linked dataset at regular frequencies, generating more longitudinal data in the future.

Our goal is to narrow the outcome gap between children growing up in disadvantage and their peers. In order to do this, we need to better understand how the outcome gap develops and who is most affected within that group of disadvantage. The work in York has allowed us to access a linked dataset, with demographic data, data on early years funding, outcomes and health referrals to help our understanding of the problem in York. If we can better identify where children are growing up in disadvantage, the support they currently have access to, their outcomes and the demographics, we can better target support for these children.

We analysed the linked dataset through a number of different lenses, creating visualisations and running statistical tests that can help inform decision making in York. Following this, we will create novel data visualisations that York can use to easily interpret their data, and most importantly, sustain this work for a number of years until they can build our work into their own data systems. 

Using the linked dataset enables us to delve into the 0-5 population and start to understand where children have the poorest outcomes and, most importantly, whether they continually have poor outcomes as they journey through the early years. We will investigate this data at a ward level, so the dedicated communities and ward teams in York can utilise the information to tailor support to each specific ward and their individual needs.

By mapping children’s outcomes across the City of York, specifically in speech, language and communication, York can implement their award-winning Early Talk for York programme in a more targeted way and provide support to the children who need it most through their Raise York family hubs.

In the second year of the Fairer Start Local partnership with York, we developed a data application, which will sit on York’s systems, that can be used to create visualisations of data about needs and early-years provision in each ward. These ‘ward profiles’ of the children aged 0-5 in the city can be updated with new data to ensure they are sustainable. The ward profiles have been used across York’s teams who work with children aged 0-5 and, for the first time, York’s team can see ward-level data which allows them to make informed decisions about service provision and support.

We also ran statistical tests and confirmed that the gender gap - by which boys’ development lags behind girls’ - starts to appear at age one and the gap between children growing up in disadvantage and their peers starts at age two. Where families reside can influence children's development, providing additional insight into indicators like gender and disadvantage that may affect a child's likelihood of meeting age-related expectations. The Healthy Child Service in York is now considering how to address this by reforming its materials and advice, especially considering that both of these gaps appear so early.

These findings are leading to a more localised, targeted approach so York can spend their budget supporting those who need it most.