We are developing two projects with Stockport City Council and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority to improve outcomes for young children in the borough. We want to find solutions that will work for local families. By engaging with local families and early years practitioners, our project team will identify local needs, while our data science project aims to understand which interventions work best at improving children’s social and emotional skills, and their speech and language development. 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 throughout the Greater Manchester city region. Interventions could be anything from developing a whole new model of health visiting in the city to piloting individual things such as a chatbot for parents or scaling up a particular parenting course.

Stockport is one of the most polarised local authorities in the country by income. While parts of the borough experience prosperity, the area has pockets of significant disadvantage. In the ward of Brinnington, where much of our work so far has focussed, more than four in ten children live in poverty.

Despite a high level of engagement in services for families, the outcome gap between children eligible for free school meals and their peers remains stubbornly higher than the national average.

Through this partnership, we want to untangle the reasons why the existing Greater Manchester Early Years Delivery Model is struggling to achieve higher outcomes for children growing up in disadvantage in Stockport. Are there challenges to it being delivered in the way it was designed? Is the existing model in line with the best evidence? Or are we not using the right metrics to measure the desired outcomes for children?

Our findings will feed directly into the next iteration of the regional Early Years Delivery Model (hopefully coming in 2022), with the potential to improve outcomes for children across the Greater Manchester city region.

Project one – the practitioner perspective

Nesta’s partnership with the local authority has allowed us to work closely with frontline staff to understand how early years services are being delivered as well as the challenges that practitioners face when supporting families.

Through workshops and a diary-keeping study, we will be able to analyse the extent to which day-to-day practice lines up with the design of the existing model for delivery in Stockport, and identify the strengths and challenges of the current model. Alongside this, we will explore where the current model aligns with evidence of best practice.

Project two – using data to understand links between interventions and outcomes

Our data analysts are using high-quality historic data provided by a centralised data-sharing system, the Greater Manchester Digital Platform, to draw out the links between interventions and outcomes for children. Through this we hope to help Stockport and the GMCA make evidence-informed decisions in the redesign of their early years model.

Stockport commissions many interventions for children and appears to enjoy relatively high take-up of services. However, the area still experiences poor outcomes for children particularly in the most deprived wards, with many children arriving in reception not “school ready”.

Currently, Stockport, like many local authorities, has no effective way to measure the impact of specific interventions on children’s outcomes. This project will explore the extent to which statutory assessment results (such as the Ages and Stages Questionnaire) and other data points can be used to find correlations and potentially causal links between interventions and outcomes. The findings will provide the potential basis for the roll-out of new tools to monitor the impact of interventions across the Greater Manchester region and other local authorities.