Transforming early years

Radical Efficiency in practice... better services at lower cost for families with young children

Transforming Early Years is a programme working with six localities across the UK to find different, better and cheaper solutions to improving the lives of families with very young children.

Transforming Early Years (TEY) is based on research, undertaken by the Innovation Unit and funded by NESTA, looking at Radical Efficiency. The Radical Efficiency concept was developed from observing the common principles that underpinned the success of 100 examples from around the world of using innovation to achieve better outcomes at lower costs. 

The Innovation Unit and NESTA have created Transforming Early Years to test Radical Efficiency in practice, to explore whether:

• Radical efficiency can be used to design services that achieve better outcomes for less budget that current services (the aim is for a 30% reduction in costs)
• The tools and support developed through the programme can enable service providers to use radical efficiency to design better and cheaper services (including beyond Children's services)

The programme was launched in 2010 with an event bringing together 50 people, from 27 localities, to introduce the type of thinking and activities that would underpin programme.  Six localities were then selected, representing a diverse mix of areas politically, demographically and in size, to take part in the programme. All of these localities have dynamic leaders who are keen to effect real change in the services they offer.

The six localities are:

• Bradford - Heaton Children's Centre
• Corby - Pen Green Children's Centre
• Essex - One Plus One and Parent's 1^st social enterprises
• Knowlsley Metropolitan Borough Council
• London Borough of Barking and Dagenham
• Reading Borough Council

The Innovation Unit closely supported the six locality teams through a project journey, which translated the Radical Efficiency model into a sequence of activities. The initial phase supported localities to gain new perspectives on the challenges they face. Following this the localities worked to generate new service ideas, which they prototyped and are now starting to implement. The new service ideas are predicted to reduce service costs by between 13% and 38% during the first year of implementation.

We have published case studies on the sites and their new service ideas. We have also published a learning report on the programme written by Goddard Payne and Temperley Research detailing insights on both early years services and radical efficiency generated by the programme.