Since 2021, Nesta’s A Fairer Start Local partnership with York City Council has been working on reducing the outcome gap of disadvantaged children aged 0-5. Within the first two years,we built a data dashboard and an application which generates ward profiles, proving it was possible to link the large datasets held by the York local authority. 

Through our Mapping early years practice project, we gained further confidence that improving data sharing and collaboration among services would be key for City of York Council (and potentially other local authorities) to unlock better targeted support for children.

In May 2024 we began the third year of the project, aiming to create a scalable data tool that could empower York local authority decision-makers to make more data-driven decisions. Taking a user-centred design approach means we take the time to empathise with the users, define problems, ideate, prototype, and test to create innovative solutions. 

By August we reached the end of the understanding phase, so we’ve detailed the design thinking processes that were involved.  Exploring the problem through workshops, interviews and site visits, we narrowed down the issues to two clear problem statements around the need for group support towards early-years settings, specifically maximising resource allocation for two specific user groups.

We started by talking to 10 key early years decision-makers through in-depth interviews to gain a broad understanding of the role data plays in their jobs and envision the types of problems a data tool could help them solve. Informed by our findings and our previous research in York, we grouped these challenges into themes recognisable to three potential user groups: strategic decision-makers, operational managers and front-line staff.

In May, we held a discovery workshop in York with 12 key stakeholders, including representatives from Special Educational Needs Service and the Vale of York, where we speed tested seven early-stage conceptual prototypes, each one used to try and solve a specific problem.  We invited workshop attendees to roleplay as potential users of the tool and evaluate whether the problems highlighted were the right ones, and envision what kind of action the prototype could facilitate.

Through the workshop we learned that key users of the potential tool would be the heads of services. These were a distinct user group whose roles covered both strategic and operational decision-making across York. As a result, their influence spans from supporting staff to leading service coordination, making a data tool critical for informed decision-making.

We also learned that focusing on service delivery in early-years settings (such as nurseries), as opposed to individual families, is a key opportunity for the data tool as these settings are crucial for identifying children's needs and providing support. While heads of services are the primary users of the tool, early-years settings benefit from their support, and in turn better support children’s needs.

Users expressed a need for a better understanding of children’s developmental needs, particularly speech, language and communication, to allocate resources effectively. They also wanted insight into whether children are receiving and engaging with necessary support, which helped us narrow down our users' goals and expectations.

We conducted in-depth interviews with four heads of services and a clinical lead from the NHS Vale of York to test our assumptions around needs and engagement, and further understand the available actions.  

Each interview was structured into two parts

1. A ‘design your ideal dashboard’ activity where we showed the interviewee four prototypes, each addressing one problem statement regarding either individual needs, individual engagement, cohort needs or cohort engagement.
   
   First we asked them to prioritise the problem(s) that would match their role responsibilities. Then we used the prototypes as prompts to gain insight about the types of data currently available to them and how they would want to organise the data. 
   
2. A journey mapping activity exploring the specific actions available to heads of services to offer support based on children’s needs and their experience of taking those actions in the past. This helped us understand where our data tool would fit in the process.

This phase helped us to understand that heads of service are first interested in understanding the needs of specific cohorts, which they would then use to understand what services children and families were engaging with and why. 

Additionally, we learnt that while each service had its own datasets to identify needs specific to their work,  there were also key indicators collected by other services, such as proxies of disadvantage or development (eg, S23 notifications, education, health and care plans), that could inform their own work.

We visited five different early-years settings in York and conducted contextual interviews with the setting managers. During these interviews we used a user journey map, along with prompt questions, to understand the children's journey through each setting. Our research focused on several key questions: 

• What does a child's journey look like from the moment they enter a setting? 
• How do these settings assess and address developmental needs?
• How do they collaborate with other services, settings, schools and parents?

Our discussions revealed that early-years settings regularly assess the needs of children in the current cohort using summative assessments and focus weeks. This meant that they had effective systems for individual and group support, but wanted more information that could enable them to proactively prepare for upcoming cohorts. For example, data on prevalent needs such as speech, language and communication and toileting. This aligned with the Early Childhood Education and Care Quality Improvement (ECEC QI) team's goals to provide preemptive support.

Settings managers also emphasised the time-consuming nature of engaging with parents and service providers to identify services children are involved with. For example, accessing information from Healthy Child Services (HCS) is challenging because families don’t always share health information with settings. The lack of  consistent information sharing agreements with health services means that settings managers need to contact practitioners directly. We want to enable the ECEC QI team to better support settings by understanding children’s developmental needs in settings as measured by the Healthy Child Service, which was not previously  accessed by the ECEC team. 

At the end of our understanding phase, we decided to develop a tool addressing the needs of heads of service, specifically those in charge of ECEC QI and HCS, and that could inform their decision-making. We recognised that both have a similar requirement to optimise resource allocation so they can meet the needs of children, particularly within or across several settings. 

By showing patterns of needs, we could enable York’s ECEC QI team to prioritise their time and effort to better target their support within and across settings, thereby freeing up resources for one-on-one support. The same data could help HCS identify settings with similar developmental needs, which health visitors could support by visiting all children within a setting, rather than duplicating one-on-one provision during home visits. 

Having evaluated the impact, scalability and feasibility of our proposal, we are moving into the design phase with confidence while continuing to test and learn with our potential users. By November/December 2024, we aim to deploy a sustainable and usable end product for York, and make an informed decision on  whether we can scale the tool to other local authorities and shape future projects and strategy development.