How can the market of parenting support in the UK drive better child outcomes at scale?
www.nesta.org.uk/blog/how-can-the-market-of-parenting-support-in-the-uk-drive-better-child-outcomes-at-scale/
www.nesta.org.uk/blog/how-can-the-market-of-parenting-support-in-the-uk-drive-better-child-outcomes-at-scale/
Children need warm and stimulating interactions with their closest caregivers in order to thrive, but unfortunately children’s early experiences in the home are highly variable between households. Inequalities in the resources available to families, including material resources, information and support, means that we can already see income-related inequalities in children’s early development by age three, with parenting playing a large role in this.
A large body of research demonstrates that parenting programmes are one of the most reliable ways to support early childhood development, including children’s socioemotional, behavioural, and cognitive development. Evidence-based parenting interventions can come in a range of formats including group-based programmes, one-to-one support in the home and online courses. These programmes provide parents with practical advice and support about how they can best nurture their children with warm and stimulating care in their earliest months and years. The most effective parenting programmes are successful at helping parents to integrate more of the most beneficial behaviours (eg, conversation, singing, reading, playing, affection and praise) into their daily interactions with their children.
Given the consistent evidence that they are effective, parenting programmes will need to be an important part of the UK Government’s mission to break down barriers to opportunity. The plan is ambitious. By 2028, the government wants to drive up the rate of 5-year-olds reaching a good level of development (in the Early Years Foundation Stage) to 75%, which would require an increase of up to 45,000 children in England alone.
This is a big but achievable target. If it is to be met, then we will need to scale the most effective parenting programmes so that they can reach the children and families who most stand to benefit. But there are significant challenges with this goal: the market of parenting support as it stands is not set up for success.
To be in a good position to meet the government’s key milestone, we will need a well-functioning market of parenting support. This will require good availability of effective programmes that respond to families’ needs and are also feasible and affordable to deliver. We will also need enough capacity to purchase and deliver these programmes at the scale required to meet families’ needs.
However, there are currently significant barriers between where we are now and where we’ll need to get to, if we want to make progress on improving children’s outcomes through parenting support. These barriers are summarised in the table below.
| Category | Identification of child and family needs | Suitable, affordable and effective programmes | Adequate information to support commissioning decisions | Deliverability at scale and feedback loops |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Enablers | Local authority knows what child and family needs are and how to reach families | Investment in the development of new programmes well-matched to family needs | Information about the cost, suitability and effectiveness of programmes is easily accessible to commissioners | Enough funding to provide parenting support at sufficient scale to meet family needs |
| Support is offered to families both preventatively and in response to identified needs | Programmes available on the market are effective and suitable to the delivery context | New programmes receive robust evaluation to establish impact before they are scaled | Parenting support is well integrated into local early-years services and delivered with high quality and fidelity | |
| Data on family need is aggregated by national government to create a national picture of need | Funders prioritise investing in the most effective parenting programmes | Data is collected on family engagement and impact and is aggregated | ||
| Barriers | Lack of local data on early years child and family needs | Lack of R&D funding to develop programmes that are suitable and effective for different types of family needs | Information about available parenting programmes is incomplete, making it hard for commissioners to evaluate costs and benefits of programmes | Insufficient funding leads to delivery capacity that is too low to meet the scale of need |
| Local data is not analysed to inform service planning | Available programmes are not well matched with the UK delivery context, including workforce, available funding and cultural adaptation | Lack of funding for evaluation means programmes are scaled without evidence of impact | Fragmented services struggle to engage parents | |
| Lack of national data to inform policy and funding decisions | Programme implementation is inadequately supported, leading to low-quality delivery | |||
| Lack of data on parent engagement and impact to support feedback loops |
Many local authorities have major challenges with planning their early-years services because they do not have easy access to data about child and family needs. While parents are the “customers” of parenting programmes, local authorities are the main purchasers, and it is hard to design a parenting support offer that is well matched to parents’ needs and preferences without adequate information. Inadequate local information is mirrored at the national level, where we only have very patchy data about family needs and child outcomes in the early years. The most complete datasets we have of child development are not collected until children start school. In England and Scotland, this assessment is conducted at 4-5 years old at the end of reception year, and in Wales it is not until children are 6-7 years old.
While there is a large number of programmes on offer, there is still room for improvement in developing really well-designed programmes that are highly tailored to families’ needs, fit well in the UK delivery context, and have robust evidence of impact on child outcomes. Developers of parenting programmes emphasise that developing an ‘evidence-based’ parenting programme is a very long-term endeavour. This process is slowed down by a lack of funding available to support the iterative process involved in developing, improving, evaluating and scaling a programme. As a result, some of the most widely scaled parenting programmes in the UK still have challenges with parent engagement or lack robust evidence of impact. Others with a strong evidence base are not being widely implemented for a range of reasons, including a lack of affordability, poor fit with the available workforce, or lack of cultural adaptation. We also know very little about how to maintain the effectiveness of programmes when they are being delivered at a large scale.
Starting with inadequate information about family needs means that early-years systems leaders are then faced with a hugely complex supplier market. In a recent mapping exercise, Nesta counted 135 parenting programmes for families with children aged under five. The size and complexity of this market makes it very hard to compare the costs, suitability and impact of different parenting interventions. As a result, it is very challenging for local commissioners to design a local offer that will be attractive and well-matched to families’ needs and lead to impact on children’s outcomes.
In the UK’s complex market of parenting support, we have a coordination problem. With each local commissioner making individual decisions for their area (based on insufficient information about family needs and a lack of consensus on the most suitable programmes), we have ended up with a very fragmented national offer.
Research by Nesta published in 2023 found that among a sample of 27 English local authorities, 63 different types of parenting programmes were on offer to parents. By diffusing and fragmenting our collective efforts among multiple programmes, we are limiting our potential to scale up the most effective parenting support to the level required to transform children’s outcomes nationally.
We currently lack the infrastructure, including centralised investment in scale-up, to ensure that effective parenting support can be provided at a high enough volume nationally, and to ensure that the quality of delivery is of a consistently high standard. High-quality implementation of well-evidenced programmes will be crucial to ensure that investment in family support leads to the type of measurable impact required to achieve the opportunity mission.
We also lack the feedback loops we need to ensure that parenting support is working well for parents and children. At the moment, we have very patchy data (both locally and nationally) about:
These feedback loops are particularly important at a local level because parents are the customers of programmes but they are not the funders. Without good data about parents’ participation and effective monitoring of whether children’s outcomes have improved, it will be difficult for local service leaders to know whether family support services are working well or if they need to make changes.
Nesta’s fairer start mission team is now working to provide new analysis to inform government policy decisions, and galvanise closer collaboration between stakeholders around a shared goal to scale up the provision of effective parenting support.
The objectives of this work are to:
This summer, we will publish the results from our analysis. We will set out our recommendations on the next steps for shaping the market of parenting support to drive improved early-years outcomes at scale.
Some of the key topics that we will cover in our report include:
We know that there is a lot of shared commitment in the early-years sector to provide more families with effective support, so that more children are on track with their development and are ready to get the best out of their education by the time they start school.
We’re looking forward to convening others around this shared goal and supporting effective collaboration to help tackle the challenges preventing parenting support from working well for families, local service commissioners, parenting programme developers and national policymakers.
