West London Zone aims to bring the right support to the right children at the right time. It does this by building trusted relationships, providing activities and interventions and joining up each child’s support system, including families, schools and local organisations, to deliver a personalised two-year support plan for each child.

The initiative uses data and school knowledge to identify the children who can benefit most from WLZ support and to develop a plan which responds to their needs across emotional wellbeing, peer relationships, confidence and attainment in English and maths.

At the heart of the WLZ programme is the role of the link worker, a skilled, empathetic, motivational professional based in the nursery or school setting. Link workers build trusted relationships with the children or young people on the programme and develop a personalised plan according to specific needs. Alongside one to ones and sessions led by the link worker, children and young people on the programme benefit from carefully curated and targeted activities brought into their school settings by local arts, sports and community partner organisations. Crucially WLZ also offers programme participants specialist support including speech and language therapy, counselling or academic tuition in their school setting. Link workers work hard to extend the trusted relationship with their young person to their parents and carers.

In summer 2022, Nesta undertook a programme of immersive research including school visits, partner activity experiences, interviews, diary activities and surveys. People we engaged with as part of this research included WLZ staff (senior management and link workers, managers and practitioners), teachers in school and early years settings, delivery partners and children and young people participating in the programme and their parents. Alongside this, we worked with WLZ’s impact team to analyse some of their data so we could map the diversity of journeys through the programme and the relationships between activities, interactions and children’s outcomes.

Using this research, we created service blueprints – diagrams that visualise the relationships between different components of a service and that show how a service is delivered and how it is experienced by the service user. Alongside this, we created participant and partner profiles and other visual maps for WLZ’s work in primary schools and early years settings. WLZ will use these materials to help potential partners in other parts of England understand the way WLZ works on the ground and any areas that could be adapted to meet the needs of their particular communities. We drew on our in-house early years education expertise to provide recommendations on the refinement of the WLZ early years programme design which is a more recent addition to the work it does. We advised on aspects of the programme that we think add the most value and are therefore most important to scale.

This work was completed in December 2022. Nesta provided WLZ’s senior management team with a set of service blueprints, data analysis and hypotheses about how the WLZ model could be further developed and adapted for new geographical locations. The project team also made recommendations for improving data collection and infrastructure to make it easier for WLZ to draw insights from their service data in future.