Data has a crucial role to play in the delivery of public services and particularly in how we make more effective decisions in the early years. These decisions could include whether or not a service should be commissioned, re-commissioned or re-designed or whether a family needs additional support that could improve children’s outcomes. Data could also be used by caregivers to make evidence-informed decisions about the care they seek for their families, for example by identifying where there is high-quality early years provision available locally.

At present, most local authorities find that their data across the early years is fragmented and incomplete. This is partly due to the design of the early years ecosystem – most children and families will engage with many services and organisations before a child even enters primary school. These organisations collect their own data and often store it independently, despite the fact that they are often seeing and working with the same families. This leads to an incomplete picture of a family and child’s needs, making it difficult for service planners and frontline professionals to provide integrated support that takes a holistic, family- and child-centred approach. This also makes it difficult for councils to share their data with families and caregivers.

Building a data tool to address these challenges presents an opportunity for councils to do more with the same resources and increase data accessibility for caregivers. The power of data tools could be better harnessed in the early years in order to join up public and private data safely and securely whilst increasing the accessibility of data. For example, in England, Policy in Practice have created the Multi Agency Safeguarding Tracker (MAST). MAST is a data tool that joins up NHS, social care, fire and rescue, and police data in order to enable professionals to make more informed decisions around safeguarding society’s most vulnerable. Yet, such data-driven measures are rarely taken in the early years. This is despite the evidence that educational inequality before the age of five has profound and long-term impacts on a child’s health, well-being, job prospects and life chances.

Data tools could ensure data is better utilised to further our understanding of early years outcomes and service use, and increase data accessibility. For example, algorithms could be developed that enable the linkage of data from different systems in real-time or tools could be built that help local authorities and families visualise the geographical distributions of early years outcomes, provision and service use across an area. Data tools in the early years could also support local authorities to understand trends in outcomes and service use over time or compare their regional performance with their regional and statistical neighbours. This knowledge could then be used to make better informed decisions about services to improve outcomes and reduce educational inequalities. Data tools in the early years could also empower caregivers to make more evidence-informed decisions about the early years provision they seek for their families.