In the UK, children from disadvantaged backgrounds start school on average four and a half months behind their more affluent peers on key child development measures. It is a gap which persists and widens throughout school years and into adulthood. A child who leaves school with few or no qualifications can expect to miss out on £100,000 of lifetime earnings and experience poorer health.

While the disadvantage gap in the early years narrowed in England between 2011 and 2017, it has since begun to widen slightly. The impact of COVID-19 on families and local services is expected to widen the attainment gap further. Despite a raft of initiatives by successive governments, including Labour’s Sure Start and Healthy Child Programme and the launch of the National Centre for Family Hubs earlier this year, the outcome gap in children’s early years remains a persistent public policy challenge.

What would it take to eliminate the early years disadvantage gap in the UK? History tells us it cannot be achieved by any single organisation working in isolation. Among academic and policy experts, commissioners and practitioners, there is a consensus that the challenge requires a variety of actors working in partnership, with a deep understanding of specific local contexts and the time and space to explore systematic solutions. Unfortunately, the capacity for long-term thinking and innovation is often among the first casualties of budget cuts when frontline delivery is under strain.

Fairer Start Local was created to address this need. These partnerships bring together Nesta and local authorities in Leeds, Stockport and York, using a range of innovation methods to trial, adapt and improve services to support children in their early years.

This report summarises the partnerships’ work so far, our ambitions for the future and the support Nesta hopes to provide to other local authorities intent on closing the outcome gap for disadvantaged children.

Fairer Start Local is a programme of innovation partnerships between Nesta and three local authorities. We have a shared commitment to make a measurable impact on outcomes for disadvantaged children, including their physical, cognitive, social and emotional development.

Each partnership combines the expertise of practitioners, policy and commissioning experts with deep expertise in innovation methods including data science, humancentric design and technology, behavioural

science and experimentation. These methods support innovation that is grounded in local context and the lived experience of families. The partnerships will apply a test-and-learn approach to find solutions that work for families. Where we succeed, we will seek to share our work with other local authorities in our wider national network and support change at scale.

Between April and July 2021, Nesta ran three rapid discovery projects to test the concept of Fairer Start Local partnerships as a means of improving early childhood development outcomes. We wanted to find out if an innovation partnership approach could produce actionable insights to improve support for families in their children’s early years, from conception to age five. This gave each project team an opportunity to experience working together and gauge whether there was fertile ground for a longer-term partnership.

The three project teams developed the following hypotheses to guide our work:

Leeds – If we could better understand who is and who isn’t accessing services, we could listen to those families and learn how to better meet their needs and improve children’s speech, language and communication outcomes.

Stockport – If we could better understand what support parents want and how they want to access it, we could improve children’s social and emotional development.

York – If we knew the barriers to parents taking up services for two-year-olds, we could support more families and improve outcomes for two-year-olds

Local partnerships proved a powerful approach. We found:

• A strong commitment among local partners to improving children’s outcomes.
• A shared desire among service leaders to be data- and evidence-informed in how they planned early years services.
• Practitioners working in local services shared their passion for supporting families and their expertise in early child development.
• Local parents voiced a strong drive to support their children’s development, and an interest in helping other families in their community.

The initial projects identified common challenges and opportunities for future work to strengthen local services and improve children’s outcomes. Recommended areas for innovation include:

• Improving data infrastructure so that local authorities can more easily analyse the data they collect and use it to evaluate their services and target children in need effectively.
• Joining up data between health services, children’s centres and early education provision, to support better co-ordination. If services can begin working towards the same metrics, they can build a shared understanding of desired outcomes and better co-ordinate interventions.
• Increasing service uptake in disadvantaged communities through identifying barriers to engagement, and understanding what services parents and carers would most value.
• Building the infrastructure to monitor service delivery in real time so that local authorities can make a robust assessment of the impact of interventions, target families in need and take an evidence-based approach to developing practice.

Having tried out these short-term partnerships and found this to be an effective way of working, all of the partners involved in the discovery projects (Nesta, Leeds, Stockport and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and York) are committed to building a longer-term collaboration over the next three to five years. Through this partnership we will develop new ways of supporting families in the early years, and test whether they are successful in reducing the outcome gap for disadvantaged children.

The new Fairer Start Local programme, launching in November 2021, will build on the opportunities identified in the discovery phase of work. Some of the shared priorities that Leeds, Stockport/GMCA and York have initially identified for this next phase of work include:

1. Increasing families’ engagement with service provision, particularly where children may be at higher risk of poor outcomes.
2. Strengthening understanding of the impact of local service provision, through improved monitoring and evaluation.
3. Improving the quality of services, such as early childhood education, parenting support and other services that support child development.
4. Reviewing the interactions between universal and targeted services and the processes by which services identify families who may need additional support.
5. Strengthening system integration to enable effective partnership working between services.
6. Supporting families with some of the wider contextual drivers of poor child outcomes, such as low income or poor housing.