At the inception of Nesta’s A Fairer Start mission, local authorities had borne the brunt of over a decade of austerity. Frontline services were stretched to breaking point and the capacity for innovation, service development and continuous improvement was severely denuded.

This report tells the story of the Fairer Start Local programme, designed to respond to this challenge. This report describes how we worked in partnership with three local authorities to test and scale new ideas to support early childhood development, offering a multidisciplinary innovation team, a structured approach to innovation, and funding support to help councils tackle the challenges that hold back their efforts to provide a fair start to local families.

• A Fairer Start Local was a £1.5 million programme that established innovation partnerships with three local authorities – Leeds City Council, Stockport Metropolitan Borough (in partnership with GMCA), and City of York Council.
• We delivered 18 innovation projects which addressed needs identified by council officers and aligned with Nesta’s mission goal to break the link between family background and life chances.
• The final year of the programme saw each local authority implement a substantial innovation; playful learning installations in Leeds, an enhanced integrated maternity pathway in Stockport and early years data tool in York.
• Key ingredients of the programme were:
  • a discovery phase to understand local needs
  • a test and learn approach to develop new solutions
  • a focus on place-based learning as test-beds for future scaling
  • the combination of innovation and early years expertise.
• We demonstrated five examples of how innovation can improve early years support:
  • improved access to and uptake of services.
  • greater collaboration and integration across services
  • better targeted interventions and strategic decision-making
  • more trusted and family-centred support
  • sparking a culture of innovation and transformation.

Our analysis of the programme led to six key learning points on how to innovate effectively. These should be reflected in future innovation initiatives for the early years sector.

1. Adopt a ‘test and learn’ approach: foster an experimental culture, testing ideas on a small scale and using real-world feedback and data to guide adaptations.
2. Effective innovation needs dedicated capacity: local innovation leads were essential to navigate local systems, convene stakeholders, and drive initiatives forward, as was bringing in specialist expertise in innovation methods.
3. Co-design with parents and practitioners: use ethnographic, design and arts-based methods to engage families and frontline staff to ensure solutions are rooted in lived and professional experience.
4. There’s no shortage of early years data – joining it up is the challenge: fragmented data, data-sharing barriers, and limited expertise hindered the effective use of data, but by focusing on existing and accessible data, early years teams gained valuable insights and improved its use.
5. Use mission-driven innovation to drive collaboration: collaboration was fostered by bringing professionals and teams together behind a common mission, which in turn helped navigate partnership challenges that arose and strengthened engagement across the system.
6. Scale starts with a solution that works in place: balancing place-based solutions with scale can be challenging but taking an ‘adopt and adapt’ approach to scaling can empower local implementers to tailor evidence-based interventions to their specific contexts while maintaining fidelity to core principles.

Nesta’s innovation tools

Local authorities’ expertise

We would like to thank everyone in the organisations who contributed to this programme: Leeds City Council, City of York Council, Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council with Greater Manchester Combined Authority, and Nesta. Throughout the programme the strength of leadership, expertise and ambition of council teams has driven projects forwards and inspired us to go further.

We would like to particularly acknowledge the project leads: Tom Symons (Nesta), Maura Appleby (Stockport), Miriam Loxham (Greater Manchester Combined Authority), Rob Newton (York), Lesley Wilkinson and Helen Binns (Leeds).