The lead applicant (who submits the Expression of Interest form) must be an eligible local authority in England, Scotland or Wales. However, any organisation (eg. a group of nurseries, a healthcare provider, or children's centre) can be a named partner in that application.

Full details of the eligibility criteria are available in the eligibility criteria or the full application pack.

Expressions of Interest must be submitted with the support of your local authority’s senior leadership. In the Expression of Interest we ask for the name and job title of the chief sponsor of the application. We recommend that the chief sponsor is at Director level within the local authority. The chief sponsor will attend project board meetings on a quarterly basis.

The application form itself can be filled in by any relevant member of staff. However, it will require an understanding of:

• Strategic priorities for early years services in your area.
• Strategic partners in your local area.
• Capacity available for ongoing delivery of the partnership.

Unfortunately we will not be able to work with every local area that expresses their interest. Therefore we have tried to design a short initial application process. We only ask for additional time input from applicants once it is clear that we will be working together (through a ‘trial discovery project’ or subsequent longer partnership).

• The initial Expression of Interest form takes about one-two hours to complete, assuming all the information is to hand.
• Only eligible applicants will then be asked to take part in a one-hour informal interview (eg. via Zoom or Microsoft Teams).
• Three-five shortlisted local areas will work with us on a ‘trial discovery project’ (see question below). This is a 12-week project with mutually beneficial outputs.
• Ultimately, we expect to form long-term (multi-year) partnerships with one-three local areas.

We will work with between three-five shortlisted local areas on a ‘trial discovery project’. This is a short project (around 12 weeks) that will take place in Spring 2021. This serves two purposes:

• We will co-design the focus on the discovery project to ensure that the outputs will be useful to the local areas in their own right for developing their early years strategy or services.
• This is an opportunity for both sides to explore what types of research and activities are likely to be most fruitful in a longer partnership, and for both sides to test out before a longer-term commitment is made.

Although we expect the majority of areas that take part in a ‘trial discovery project’ will go on to form a long-term partnership with Nesta, the process is designed to lead to outputs that are valuable in their own right. For example, outputs from a trial discovery project could include:

• Findings from participatory research with families currently using services to understand what would make services more attractive and useful to them.
• Identification and analysis of locally held data sets. For example, to map patterns of need in communities to help inform earlier intervention.
• An analysis of existing identified problems, with recommendations of where particular methods may be useful to tackle specific barriers (eg. use of behavioural science to increase uptake of entitlement).

The ‘trial discovery projects’ will require some time investment from local area partners. Specifically: a lead contact with capacity to work with Nesta (eg. attend planning meetings and make introductions to service providers) and convene stakeholders for a small number of workshops to help define and improve the ongoing work.

Each eligible ‘Expression of Interest’ will be assessed by multiple Nesta staff and given a score for each of the criteria below:

Need: High-scoring applicants can demonstrate that there is a strong need for improvement in their local area, and that there is potential for the partnership to impact significantly on children’s outcomes.

Alignment of strategic priorities with Nesta mission: High-scoring applicants have a clear strategy or vision for improving outcomes in the early years, necessary buy-in from senior leadership and service providers, and an ambition and openness to redesign or change services through the partnership.

Understanding of challenges and potential for impact in partnership with Nesta: High-scoring applicants can clearly articulate specific opportunities or barriers related to their early years strategy around which an innovation partnership could focus.

Nesta is an innovation foundation and registered charity. Our mission is to bring bold ideas to life to change the world for good.

Nesta is self-funding its contribution to this work from its own charitable endowment. Local areas will be working with Nesta’s mission team – made up of experts in early years provision and research evidence, data scientists, behavioural scientists and designers – all focused on improving children’s outcomes.

Nesta has lots of experience working closely in partnership with local authorities. You can find out more about specific programmes such as our 100 Day Challenges, the Upstream Collaborative, or Creative Councils (and other projects in partnership with areas) on our website.

Nesta has experience of supporting innovation in the early years sector. However, we know that the most important insights into local areas and specific service provision will come from the expertise in local areas themselves. Our recent projects include working with a number of organisations supporting families during the early years through the Early Years Social Action Fund. We also recently published Parents helping parents, a report about how the power of parents and their communities can be harnessed to better support families with young children.

For information on the time involved in submitting an application and taking part in a ‘trial discovery project’, see questions 3 and 4.

For long-term local area partners, we expect local authorities to have a designated lead contact or project manager for the project with at least 0.5 FTE available to drive this work forward. This person is responsible for coordinating with Nesta, within the local authority, and with any other local partner organisations. We are flexible as to how exactly local partners want to manage this role, and the ‘Trial Discovery Project’ is a chance to learn more about how to manage this to suit all needs.

We do not specify resources required for piloting projects or implementing new approaches. However, we have two key expectations:

• A high level of ambition: Working in partnership for three-five years is a significant amount of time. We hope that local areas are keen to use this opportunity to consider how we can redesign aspects of early years support in bold ways.
• Willingness to unlock or reorientate existing resources: The partnership is designed to be flexible to local area strategic priorities and long-term plans. While we do not expect local area partners to contribute ‘new money’, by closely aligning our partnership working to an area’s existing priorities, we hope that local areas will be able to unlock or reorientate existing resources in novel ways.

Nesta’s primary resource contribution is through project staff with particular skills and expertise. This is funded through Nesta’s charitable endowment.

In addition, to support the partnership's work, Nesta is providing an ‘innovation fund’ which will be a contribution towards associated costs of developing and implementing ideas developed through the partnership, such as licenses to practice evidence-based interventions and evaluation.

In the first year of the partnership, up to £200,000 is available for project expenditure, shared across a small number (one-three) of local area partners. Further funding will be made available in subsequent years.

COVID-19 will continue to have a huge impact on the lives of children, families and professionals providing early years services. We appreciate the huge challenges and burdens that COVID-19 is currently placing on public services. We have sought to make this application as light touch as possible in recognition that professionals working in early years services currently have very limited time.

As the scope and priorities of the partnership will be developed collaboratively, we will aim to work as flexibly as possible around any changing restrictions or constraints caused by COVID-19. Indeed, it may be that mitigating the harmful impact of COVID-19 on access to services is an issue local area partners will wish to focus on.

Nesta works in all four countries of the UK. Although COVID-19 restrictions are likely to mean that meetings in the coming months will be done online, across the life of the partnership we hope to be able to do lots of work in-person and spend significant time in partner areas where possible.

We have decided to limit participation in this particular programme to England, Wales and Scotland because we concluded that the combination of contextual differences in Northern Ireland, and our less developed government and local government networks there, meant that we could not be confident of the successful delivery of the work there. We aim for other initiatives within this innovation mission to be open to Northern Ireland.

You can see the questions included in the Expression of Interest form:

• For applicants from England.
• For applicants from Scotland and Wales.

Applications to the Early Years Innovation Partnerships will only be considered if they meet the eligibility criteria. If you do not meet these criteria and are interested in pursuing work focused on addressing other intersecting types of inequality impacting on children’s outcomes (e.g. according to race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation), please contact us to discuss further, at [email protected]. There may be future opportunities to work together on other areas of Nesta’s work – either focused on improving children’s outcomes in the early years or in secondary school.

Yes, we are willing to consider alternative forms of project management resourcing, such as those outlined in the question. The important thing is that the local authority will have an identified project lead to coordinate with Nesta and other local partners, as well as sufficient capacity to dedicate to this work, so that the partnership can be successful and make a positive impact. We envisage the project manager helping with coordination tasks, navigating local systems and structures, supporting logistics and planning work, among other things. You can outline how you intend to resource the work in the last question included in the Expression of Interest form.

We have asked for local authorities in Scotland and Wales to provide specific outcomes data as a point of comparison (see the Expression of Interest form here; section A, question 5). However, we realise that data relating to a whole local authority does not necessarily demonstrate the specific challenges faced by particular communities, such as rural communities, within that area. Therefore we have given local areas the option to also include additional data that they feel better captures the types of challenges they are facing. You may choose to report additional outcome measures/ attainment gaps affecting specific groups of children (defined geographically or according to other demographic characteristics) if you feel that this would better capture the particular challenges faced in your local authority area.

Yes, this would be absolutely fine. The important thing is to provide clear information about the types of challenges faced in your local authority area. This may focus on one or more geographical areas within your local authority. There will be opportunities to further discuss and refine the focus of the work if the partnership should go ahead.

If you would like help with contacting interested local authorities who have already made contact with Nesta, to explore the potential for collaborating on an expression of interest, please contact Nesta at [email protected]. We are currently exploring how we could offer this ‘matchmaking’ service while adhering to the General Data Protection Regulation.

Through the partnership we are open to working with any part of your early years system that could lead to improved outcomes for children aged 0-5. We anticipate that there are many areas of your overall strategy that could be included in the partnership over the course of the 3-5 year programme. It would be quite appropriate to include work being done in family hubs, housing or skills, and other family support or early years services, as part of this programme.

No – for English local authorities, if any district is eligible then you can apply. The eligibility criteria are used solely to assess whether a local authority can apply or not, they will not be used to rank applications. Eligible applications will be assessed according to evidence of the need in that area, strategic alignment with Nesta and understanding of the challenges and opportunities for impact, as outlined above in the scoring criteria (see above).

The time commitments to the programme can be resourced by the local authority as best suits their staffing structures and capacity. We request that a local authority would commit the equivalent of at least one project lead, to work on the programme for 0.5 FTE. The project lead does not need to be early years specific. We are also asking for a project sponsor at Director level to participate in the project governance. The partnership will also require some ad hoc participation from other local service providers (e.g. health services, schools, local voluntary sector) as needed to plan and deliver the work being developed.

Yes. Nesta will select 3-5 local authorities to participate in the Trial Discovery Phase. Of these, only 1-3 will continue on to develop a long-term Innovation Partnership with Nesta. All local authorities who participate in the Trial Discovery phase will develop a high-level programme plan for the next three years. Any materials or plans that are developed during the Trial Discovery Phase will be owned jointly by Nesta and the local authority. Local authorities that do not go on to develop a long-term partnership with Nesta can continue to develop and implement these plans independently.

Yes. The way that your local authority operates, and any existing governance or advisory structures in place will be taken into account in how we plan our joint working arrangements with you. We want to develop governance arrangements for the Innovation Partnership that will work well and align with existing decision-making processes.

We believe that co-design and participation of children and families will be important to the success of the Early Years Innovation Partnerships. The exact methods for enabling participation will be unique to each local authority and co-designed in partnership with local families and professionals. We do anticipate that there will be involvement of local parents in the governance arrangements, to ensure that they are able to inform decision-making, and that co-design and co-production will be central features of our work.

We are open to working in partnership with other organisations in a variety of ways. We are keen to learn from good practice internationally, and to share our learning from the Early Years Innovation Partnerships with those who could benefit from it. If you would like to discuss this with Nesta, please contact us at [email protected].

No. The full list of eligibility criteria is available to read. There are no other exclusion criteria in addition to those you see listed. We would be excited to work both with organisations that have previously worked with Nesta and with organisations that are completely new to Nesta.