We are collaborating with City of York Council to improve outcomes for young children in the city, with a range of projects aimed at developing solutions that will work for local families and services. By engaging with local families and early years practitioners our project team will identify local needs, while our data science work aims to understand patterns of engagement with services across the city and how these relate to children’s outcomes. During this three-to-five-year partnership, we will be able to design and test solutions with communities, with the potential to scale successful interventions across other areas, including the other fairer start local partners in Stockport and Leeds. Interventions could be anything from developing a new model of health visiting which focuses on parental and infant mental health, to piloting individual things such as a dashboard allowing services to visualise their data in new ways, or scaling up a particular speech and language support programme.

York is a city with great strengths to support early childhood development, but a number of challenges too. It is a city of wide contrasts – there are stark inequalities between advantaged and disadvantaged families. In York’s most affluent ward, only 7% of children live in poverty – but in the least advantaged wards, over 20% children are living in poverty.

This discrepancy translates into a wide gap in outcomes for disadvantaged children on a range of education and health measures. The gap in York is wider than the national average and has proved persistently difficult to close.

Through this partnership, we want to explore how we can improve outcomes for York’s most disadvantaged children, and ensure every child has the best possible start in life so they can thrive and reach their potential. What do families in York want and need, and how can support be offered in the most engaging way possible? How can the early years sector and other relevant agencies work together in a more joined up way to support families across the whole system? How can we embed and scale promising existing initiatives in a sustainable way?

Our work will explore these and other questions, and share learning across the other partner areas in the fairer start local programme. Our approach aims to combine the deep expertise and existing relationships of City of York Council and York’s diverse early years sector with Nesta’s own expertise in data science, experimental evaluation and design. We’re excited to be able to work closely together for such a sustained period of time, giving us opportunities to test out how different methods can be applied to tackle challenging problems, and to really understand the context, systems and people in York that we will be working with and for.

Improving take-up of the two-year-old health & development review

Nesta’s partnership with the local authority has allowed us to work closely with frontline staff to collaboratively test out new ways of delivering early years services.

With the Healthy Child Service, we have co-designed and started piloting a range of service changes to try and increase the number of families taking up the two-year-old health & development review (one of the key opportunities to support families in the early years) and to ensure resources are targeted towards the most vulnerable. These changes include switching to offering families an allocated appointment time, rather than inviting them to make one; introducing text reminders for appointments; applying behavioural insights to all communications with families; screening those who miss their appointments for risk of poor outcomes, and following up with targeted home visits for those flagged; and comprehensive data collection including family feedback to help the service better understand how families interact with it.

Initial reviews of the data have shown early signs of promise. We are going to be evaluating and reporting on the pilot in summer 2022, with the potential to scale up this model and apply the learnings to other areas and service contact points.

Developing a data dashboard

Our data science team has also developed a prototype data dashboard for the Healthy Child Service. The tool aims to help service managers better understand patterns of engagement with the two-year-old health & development review, by visualising data in new ways to see trends and help identify where resources may need to be focused.

The dashboard has now been fully built and introduced by York’s Business Intelligence team, and service managers are starting to use it in their work. We will be evaluating it in summer 2022 and the long-term ambition is to broaden the scope of the dashboard to encompass other services and outcome areas to give a much better understanding of local community needs.