Early years professionals have one of the most crucial jobs imaginable: nurturing young children and setting the foundation for lifelong learning.
At Nesta, one of the core pillars of our fairer start mission is supporting the early years workforce. With artificial intelligence (AI) already on the rise in primary and secondary schools, we’re running a programme of work to explore how AI can empower early years professionals to provide more high-quality and effective early childhood education and care experiences.
This report outlines the three most promising matches we’ve found between what AI can do and what early years professionals need. We also share what we’ve learned about why there’s not more innovation already happening in the sector.
Building from these insights, we’re now starting to test three ideas that could bring the benefits of AI to early years professionals and address the barriers that prevent innovation from starting and spreading in the sector.
If you’d like to hear more, please get in touch.
How we’re exploring the role of AI in Early Childhood Education and Care
We are working towards a vision of an Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) system that is enabled and empowered to deliver better childcare quality and outcomes for children, through AI. This programme will stress test this vision through experiments, explore roles Nesta could play to reach it, and/or build evidence on whether or not this vision is desirable, viable and feasible.
Our project consists of three phases, and this report shares key learnings from the first phase
- Understand: Identify and start to demonstrate the role Nesta could play to catalyse the use of AI to improve the efficiency and/or effectiveness of frontline practitioners
- Design: Deliver/enable interventions that people use/benefit from in the real world and create the desired results
- Scale: Grow interventions/intervention enablers so that AI tools can reach all the professionals across the UK who can benefit from them.
Through summer/autumn 2024, we ran a series of sprints to develop insights on the pain points in early years that could be amenable to AI tech solutions and understand the factors that affect the implementation of tools like this in nursery settings. Throughout the project so far, we have carried out numerous interviews, speaking to early years innovators, ECEC sector leaders, ECEC front-line professionals, academics and investors. We also undertook desk research including a review of relevant reports and research on ECEC and AI, as well as sector news.
