BBC Tiny Happy People is a free online resource for supporting parents to develop the language and communication skills of their children aged 0-4. They promote a simple message: talk with children as early as possible, BBC Tiny Happy People will show you how and why it’s important. To enable this, their platforms host a wide range of content  that includes hundreds of videos with tips for parents, primarily targeting early language and communication.

Professor Danielle Matthews, specialising in early language and communication, recently evaluated the impact of a BBC Tiny Happy People text messaging service. Funded by the BBC, and in collaboration with the Universities of Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, Oxford and Melbourne, this randomised controlled trial sent text messages to parents that linked to one of their videos. Parents in the intervention group were sent around three messages every month between the time their baby was six months old until their child’s second birthday. This evaluation showed that parents who received language learning videos from BBC Tiny Happy People were more likely to have improved their linguistic responsiveness compared to the control group. 

This project is a collaboration between Nesta, BBC Education and the University of Sheffield. We aim to:

• improve the design of the BBC Tiny Happy People text messaging service to reach more parents and boost parental engagement through regular use
• increase the impact of the intervention by supporting early childhood development across a broader set of areas  Specifically, we want to target children’s socio-emotional development as well as their communication and language outcomes
• learn how we can best recruit parents to sign up for the text message service so that we can scale it effectively and reach a large number of families.

In line with our mission goals, there are at least three barriers that we aim to tackle through this project: 

1. By age three, children experiencing socio-economic disadvantage tend to be behind their peers in key areas of development for later thriving at school
2. Low engagement of parents experiencing socio-economic disadvantage with parenting support and information
3. Limited accessible parenting support available to parents (often due to challenges with funding this support locally, as well as challenges coordinating support across a range of early years services)

This project contributes to tackling these barriers by improving the design and content of a low-cost digital parenting intervention. We want to improve access to high-quality resources for lower-income parents and increase their engagement with these tools. We will also evolve the digital platform, ensuring the sign-up process is straightforward to improve the likelihood of scaling this programme successfully.

This unique collaboration brings together high-quality content, design and partnership expertise to: 

• improve user engagement and embed the intervention in local communities, 
• leverage academic expertise to deliver highly effective messages and a high promise of visibility and reach.  

The project team will:

• establish a parent advisory group to guide the project and help with recruiting parents from our target audience
• iterate further on the content and design of BBC Tiny Happy People as a text message programme with the BBC and the University of Sheffield, leveraging our expertise in design and scaling
• explore the extent to which the text message service could include content to support other domains of development (beyond the core speech, language and communication), for example socio-emotional development
• examine routes to scaling a live model of the text message programme and partnerships that would enable this. BBC Tiny Happy People and Sheffield are very interested in scaling this to a wide audience of parents and are keen to use Nesta’s knowledge and experience with local authorities and other innovative partnerships 
• design and test a prototype landing page on the BBC website for a limited number of parents to sign up for the improved programme.