All babies and children need stable, caring relationships and stimulating experiences to thrive. The environment and experiences of early childhood shape our brains and bodies, creating the building blocks of our physical, emotional and cognitive skills. However,not every child gets what they need for their development during the early years. Children growing up in poverty are less likely to live a long, fulfilling and happy life than their peers. 

Our fairer start mission focuses on addressing this disadvantage from multiple angles – collaborating with local authorities to boost the services they provide and developing and adapting programmes to support parents.  Alongside these interventions, we cannot ignore the reality that growing up in poverty is harmful for child development – nor evidence that material increases in family income improve children’s early attainment at school.

We believe that with the right support, every child can have what they need to thrive. 

It is clear that poverty can affect the development of babies and young children, putting them at greater risk of falling behind for years to come. Yet the question of whether investment in the early years should be directed towards more generous benefits or more or better services remains an important, unanswered challenge for policymakers.

As part of answering this question, we want to better understand the causal effect of increasing household income and its impact on child development outcomes for families with a low income. As a society, we can then support the greatest number of families with the most cost-effective support, so all children can reach their full potential.

Our aim is to assess different models of income support – on their own and in relation to other early-years support and interventions – to test their impact on reducing inequalities in children’s outcomes. We will also develop policy options that respond to this evidence. Our work will involve engaging parents and families, gleaning new insights from existing trials and administrative data, and making observational studies (for example, exploiting natural experiments around new policy roll-outs). 

Through these projects, we seek to better understand the impact of financial support on child development, parental stress and the home learning environment, and to assess the cost-effectiveness of different early-years and income support interventions. We may also pursue randomised controlled trials to evaluate interventions, such as cash transfers or income maximisation, that support disadvantaged families’ financial circumstances during the critical years of their babies’ development. 

We’ve started work that aims to develop solutions that directly benefit disadvantaged families (eg, via income maximisation and financial inclusion). and shift the policies and systems which determine the availability of financial support(eg, via evaluating current policy and the long-term cost-benefits of early investment).

1. Exploring ways to maximise family income (completed)

£19 billion in benefits are unclaimed each year by people who are entitled to the support, so we undertook a rapid research project in collaboration with the Behavioural Insights Team to explore why. We aimed to: 

• better understand the landscape of income maximisation tools and services
• estimate how much money is unclaimed, by who and for which benefits
• develop hypotheses about how Nesta can support the sector. 

2. Promoting financial inclusion amongst families with young children (in progress) 

Our prior research indicates that, in addition to increasing household income, financial inclusion services could significantly benefit low-income families with young children in the UK, who often struggle with saving, managing debt, and accessing loans. This research project aims to determine if financial exclusion is a major problem for these families, identify the specific types they face, and explore how Nesta can help promote financial inclusion amongst families with young children.

3. The impact of the 2017 reductions in family benefits on early child learning (in progress) 

This mixed-methods project, conducted in collaboration with the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), seeks to understand the impact of the two-child limit policy on early learning outcomes in England. The qualitative component, led by Nesta, involved interviewing 35 parents affected by the policy about their children's early-learning opportunities. The quantitative component, led by the IFS, will use the ECHILD database to compare the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile outcomes of children affected by the policy with those who are not.

4. Estimating the return on investment from supporting families in the early years (in progress) 

US-based research demonstrates that financial support during children's early years can significantly improve long-term life outcomes. This project aims to explore how early years policies and programmes generate long-term social and economic returns, and to estimate the economic returns of policies that change income for families with young children. Our ultimate aim is to shape UK policy discussions and spending to reflect the long-term benefits for individuals and society.