Through these projects, the local partnerships learned about the many strengths and resources that currently exist in the three local areas, which can be built on in future work.

These included:

• A strong commitment among all local partners to improving children’s outcomes. This inspired an open-minded willingness to interrogate and challenge existing practice and experiment with new ways of working.
• The desire among service leaders to be data-driven and evidence-informed in how services are planned and evaluated.
• A rich local offering of early years services from pregnancy onwards, with many passionate and knowledgeable professionals working with families to support children’s development.
• A range of voluntary and community organisations with strong relationships with local parents and carers. In Leeds we started to learn about the potential to build on these relationships to reach parents and carers who were not currently engaging in council-run services, including those who were speakers of English as an additional language.
• Parents and carers who have a strong drive to support their children’s development; some also talked about their role in helping other families in their community.

As well as these many strengths, there were also challenges and opportunities for improving local services. Due to the short timescales of the projects, it was not possible to tackle all of these areas in one project, but we look forward to incorporating the learnings in future Fairer Start Local projects.

Some of these opportunities for future work include:

1. Improving data infrastructure so that local authorities can analyse the data they collect and use it to evaluate their services and target children in need effectively

The data analysed in these projects about service use and children’s outcomes provided useful insights for the local teams and often informed the trajectory of the project work. However, services use a variety of metrics and methods to collect and store data, which is a challenge for evaluation. In the future there may be opportunities to link more datasets, including health data and children’s services data, to allow for a more detailed analysis of the intersection of those characteristics which can lead to families not accessing services. For example, it would be useful to know whether the families who are not accessing the Health Review for two year olds are also not taking up the childcare offer. By identifying children who may be at risk of poorer outcomes earlier, we can help services to provide interventions at vital points in children’s development, as well as better target support towards those families who are most in need.

2. Supporting improved co-ordination between local services

When a wide range of services from different providers are available for children, systems can become challenging for service users

to navigate. Common tools for assessing children’s development, and a shared language for practitioners, could facilitate better co-ordination between services and more consistency in how we work with families.

In this project we witnessed practitioners sharing their knowledge of the different services on offer, and how closer relationships between service providers can lead to stronger local collaboration. By continuing these conversations, and by sharing data which allows children to be supported more consistently across local services, we can make it easier for families to access the support they need for their children.

3. Building capacity for engaging with families, to help increase the take-up of services in disadvantaged communities

The data analysis conducted throughout this work often reinforced what we were being told by practitioners who work directly with families. It was no surprise to local practitioners that families living in more disadvantaged and minoritised communities were less likely to take up universal services such as the health check for two year olds, as well as targeted services such as the free entitlement to early education at age two. However, the solution to this challenge is not always straightforward and a deeper level of engagement with families will be needed to better understand their motivations, as well as the barriers to them taking up services.

In all three local authority areas, partners were keen to improve their practice and infrastructure for engaging with local families, to understand more about what kinds of support parents and carers would value and how current services could be improved. Interviews with professionals identified this wish to increase “insight at community level – i.e. what do parents want and need?” A professional from one local area commented that “It’s easy to talk to those already engaged in multiple ways – but still not reach the most disadvantaged”. There were particular challenges posed by rapidly changing demographics, particularly within some of the most disadvantaged communities. More time was needed to build links with these newer communities, including families who had recently emigrated to the UK. Fairer Start Local aims to develop a deeper understanding of these families’ experiences and values so we can respond effectively and ensure these families are engaged as quickly as possible.

4. Building the infrastructure to monitor service delivery in real-time

In all three local areas, service leaders wanted to increase their capacity to take data-driven and evidence-informed decisions. Managers running local services thought that the infrastructure for monitoring service delivery, and understanding whether services were achieving their intended impact, could be improved. In one local area, they wanted to find out: “Why do we have ‘good’ services, but poor outcomes at EYFS?”

In the next stage of our work, the Fairer Start Local partnerships will seek to strengthen the infrastructure for monitoring services in each area, so that local authorities can robustly assess interventions, target families in need, and pursue an evidence-informed approach to developing practice