From the moment of conception, the life trajectories of children in richer and poorer families begin to diverge. Children born into disadvantage are far more likely to experience poorer health, have lower adult earnings, live shorter lives and enjoy lower levels of happiness than their peers (University of York, 2020).

We know that supporting families in early childhood can improve outcomes for disadvantaged children. Yet progress to narrow the disadvantage gap in the early years has stalled and recently the gap even widened slightly. It is also expected that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on early years provision may have further contributed to a worsening of the attainment gap. There are numerous factors, including the fractured responsibility for national early childhood policy, fragmented service delivery, an overstretched early years workforce and a range of pressures on parents, which combine to leave too many children without the support they need in their early years.

Nesta’s A Fairer Start Mission has the goal of eliminating the gap in outcomes between disadvantaged children and their peers, targeting the years between conception and when children start school. Most of the services and support that children and their parents receive during the early years is at a highly localised level, delivered through a combination of local authority, NHS, private and voluntary services. In the context of significant funding constraints, the early years sector lacks the capacity for service innovation to maximise the use of existing resources. By working with local services to apply innovation methods, Nesta can fill this gap. This might mean helping early years providers to make better use of their data, redesign their services, or improve the impact of their communications with parents.

Teams from Leeds City Council, City of York Council and Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) with Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council brought together local partners with a deep knowledge of their communities’ specific needs and the existing support ecosystem. They were keen to work with Nesta to apply a range of innovation methods and explore how their offers could be re-designed, delivered and evaluated in ways that would have the most impact on outcomes for children.

Our shared aim for these rapid discovery projects was to create actionable insights that can be used to improve the design and delivery of services for families and monitor the impact of those changes on outcomes for children in their communities. Additionally, each team had the chance to trial this way of working in collaboration, before committing to a longer-term partnership.

On 3 November 2020, Nesta put out an open call to local authorities across the UK to work in partnership on a three month trial discovery project. Through this process Nesta identified Leeds City Council, Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council/GMCA and City of York Council as local authorities that shared Nesta’s vision and could see the value of working in partnership to use innovation methods to improve their early years offer.

Nesta and the three local area partners developed these trial discovery partnerships on the basis of shared values:

1. A commitment to narrowing the outcome gap between children growing up in deprivation and the national average.
2. A commitment to practice inclusive innovation and promote equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI).
3. Participation of parents and carers in defining the problem and developing new solutions.
4. Openness and transparency: sharing our working in the open and sharing learning with a wider network of peer local Authorities.

(These shared values will continue to frame our work as we develop a longer programme of work for A Fairer Start Local.)

Table 2. The three local areas in numbers

• The percentage of children (under 16) in low-income families (2019) was 22% in Leeds, 15% in Stockport and 13% in York.
• The percentage of children eligible for free school meals (FSM) reaching a good level of development (2019) was 66% in Leeds, 46% in Stockport and 53% in York.
• The percentage of children overall reaching a good level of development in 2019 was 66% in Leeds, 70% in Stockport and 76% in York.
• The pupil-premium gap difference between free school meal-eligible children and non-free school meal-eligible children reaching a good level of development was 23 in Leeds, 27 in Stockport and 25 in York.
• In 2019, the number of children in primary school was 75,209 in Leeds, 26,273 in Stockport and 14,606 in York.
• The number of children claiming free school meals in primary school in 2019 was 13,961 in Leeds, 3,294 in Stockport, and 1,375 in York.
• The proportion of children in primary school with a first language other than English (2021) is 22% in Leeds, 11% in Stockport and 9% in York.
• Life expectancy at birth (2017-2019) in Leeds was 82.1% for females and 78.18% for males, in Stockport the expectancy was 83.29% for females and 79.83% for males in Stockport, and in York, the expectancy was 83.65% for females and 80.17% for males.

The three 16-week discovery projects began in April 2021. Each followed the same rhythm of sprint working with regular meetings in a fortnightly cycle and several key touchpoints spaced throughout the timeline. Each of the three partners developed their own focus for their project.

In York the focus of the project was: “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.”

Our working hypothesis was that by improving take-up of the universal Health Review and targeted early years childcare offers for two year olds, this would contribute to narrowing the gap when children begin school.

To explore this hypothesis we:

1. Undertook data analysis to better understand communities within the city and explore the interplay between geography and demographics with rates of take-up and children’s outcomes.
2. Engaged with families – via interviews and a text messaging survey – to better understand the barriers to take-up of health and childcare services and test alternative messaging and language for future communications from the council.
3. Piloted a new service model for the Health Review for two year olds in one area of the city, working with the Healthy Child Service team and other professionals to design a more engaging, responsive and targeted service.
4. Developed a prototype data dashboard for the city to enable ongoing use of real-time data (both quantitative and qualitative) and to allow service delivery to be more community responsive in the future.

In Stockport the focus of the project was on improving social and emotional development outcomes for children. Our hypothesis was: “If we better understand what support parents want and how they want to access it, we could improve children’s social and emotional development.”

1. System and service mapping workshops with providers in the council and frontline practitioners to map out the full ecosystem of services and support.
2. Interviews with parents to test how their experience of the support available to them lined up with the range of perception of professionals, and to understand the barriers and facilitators to accessing support.
3. Data analysis to map out the impact of specific interventions, see what is working well, and identify times when children might benefit from additional support.
4. Co-creation workshops with parents in Stockport and other local authorities within Greater Manchester, to imagine and develop new ideas to improve support for families, based on the challenges identified in the project. These prototypes will be piloted in Stockport in the future.

In Leeds our initial working hypothesis was: “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.” We also decided to specifically focus the project on improving children’s speech, language and communication outcomes.

To explore this hypothesis, we:

1. Interviewed a range of practitioners who support families and children aged 0-5, to understand what services they provide to support children’s speech, language and communication development. We also asked them about the strengths of current service delivery, as well as challenges.
2. Visually mapped the range of services that are currently on offer in Leeds and the connections between them.
3. Analysed data on children’s communication and language outcomes, as well as the take-up of the free entitlement to early education at age two, to see how this varies across the city.
4. Interviewed parents and carers in an area of Leeds where a lower proportion of children are currently reaching expected language and communication development in reception year, to hear about how they support their children to learn, what types of services they use and activities they enjoy, and any challenges they face.