Integrated family support systems are a proven, effective means of improving children’s outcomes by addressing families’ needs and empowering them to support their children. Many years of austerity, a pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis have not only eroded families’ resources and resilience but also the support available to them. Services once delivered via the Sure Start programme have seen their funding and scope significantly reduced. There is an urgent need to re-invigorate these approaches, powered by a long-term vision, a clear set of targets and outcomes, and a strong national policy framework.

Our project with the Ethos Foundation is designed to leverage the early-years sector’s and families’ collective intelligence to inform a long-term vision for joined-up family support services and the optimal design and governance of such a system. The project brings together what the evidence, the experts by experience, and the experts by profession say to inform a future policy vision.

Until now, Nesta has been in the evidence-gathering stage of the project. We analysed over 100 grey and academic publications, alongside responses from our open call for evidence we ran in autumn 2024. We also conducted focus groups with practitioners, interviews with experts in the field and ethnographies with families with lived experience. This stage has focused on synthesising key insights about what constitutes effective integrated early-years delivery, while also considering the barriers, trade-offs and challenges that arise in this context.

What makes up a policy vision?

To help us understand what questions or decisions a policymaker needs to consider when forming a policy framework, we have defined an analytical framework that outlines the overarching questions: why, who, what and how.

We are now entering a deliberation and consensus building phase of the project. To guide this, we are running a modified Delphi survey in February 2025. From the evidence gathering phase, we have identified what policy decisions need to be made to build a framework and what options are available. A range of experts (including practitioners, academics, funders, commissioners, and those in service delivery) are asked to review and rank various options for a future system of integrated family support to establish the range of opinion on several key parameters of integrated early-years delivery. If you would like to find out more and get involved, please get in touch at [email protected].

The survey is a two-stage process. The second stage will run during a series of workshops in April, where the first round results will be played back to the responders, and there will be space to discuss and deliberate before responding again to the survey. These will be run by the Centre for Collective Intelligence Design (CCID) using their Zeitgeist tool for scalable public deliberation, and building on the success of their past projects engaging the public in policy decision-making.

It has become increasingly apparent from the evidence that co-designing integrated support with families, experts by experience, is important for the quality and credibility of the vision or design. To incorporate this, we will also run a series of structured consensus-building co-design workshops with families that we have worked with through ethnographies and digital storytelling in earlier stages of the project. These will also be run by CCID using their Zeitgeist tool.

The final stage of the project will be publishing a report that will outline a policy vision for integration in early years by triangulating the perspectives of experts by experience, experts by profession, and the evidence base.