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Reimagining early years support: lessons from First Five South Carolina

How to make good things happen: global lessons for UK policymakers

20 Jan 2026 13:00 – 14:00

Online

Free

Join us for Nesta and BIT’s next instalment of: How to make good things happen, our event series that explores policy success stories from around the globe and draws learnings on how they can be applied in the UK.

The UK’s early years system can feel like a maze. Fragmented across health, education and welfare, the difficulty of finding and applying for support from funded childcare to financial benefits is a major barrier for the families who need help most.

South Carolina's state government has successfully engineered a powerful digital solution to this problem: First Five South Carolina. This pioneering platform provides a single, central entry point for parents of children aged 0–5, allowing them to check eligibility for a huge range of government programs and, crucially, submit one common application. The impact has been remarkable: in its first year, over 137,000 families visited the platform, leading to more than 2,400 completed applications.

On Tuesday 20 January, 13:00-14:00 GMT we will explore and critically assess South Carolina’s approach to supporting parents in the early years. As UK policymakers finalise the rollout of Family Hubs and expand childcare entitlements, our expert panel including Mary-Alice Doyle, Principal Researcher, Nesta, Ann Vandervleit, Executive Director, First Steps South Carolina, Dan Wuori, Founder and President, Early Childhood Policy Solutions and Connie Muttock, Head of Policy, Centre for Young Lives will discuss what lessons we can learn from First Five SC and how to truly deliver a unified ‘single front door’ in practice.

This online event will be of interest to UK policymakers, local authority leaders, and early years professionals. You will learn the steps required to move beyond fragmented services and how lessons from South Carolina can be immediately applied to UK policy to ensure that every child gets the best start in life.

Mary-Alice Doyle

She/Her

Mary-Alice is a principal researcher in the fairer start mission, leading research work on the link between family income and child outcomes. She is passionate about the potential for rigorous evidence to inform policy and practice and ultimately improve lives. Originally trained as an economist, Mary-Alice has worked across academia, government and the non-profit sector. Before Nesta, she served as research lead at Policy in Practice, leveraging administrative data to generate local and national policy insights in the UK. Prior to that, she worked at J-PAL North America managing large-scale randomised controlled trials of public and health economics interventions. Mary-Alice is currently pursuing a PhD in Social Policy at the London School of Economics, exploring the relationship between benefits policy and human capital formation. Her research focuses on unpicking the channels linking very early life experiences with health and wellbeing trajectories.

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Connie Muttock

She/Her

Connie is the Head of Policy at the Centre for Young Lives. With a background in policy and communications in the voluntary and public sector, Connie was previously a Senior Policy Advisor and Head of Communications for the Domestic Abuse Commissioner. She holds a Master of Science in Social Policy from the University of Pennsylvania, and is a Thouron Scholar.

Ann Vandervliet

She/Her

Ann Vandervliet is the executive director of South Carolina First Steps, a state agency and nonprofit committed to ensuring that all of South Carolina's children are prepared for success in school. As the leader of the state's Early Childhood Advisory Council, Ann is also strengthening the public, private, and nonprofit systems that support families and young children from birth to age five. With nearly 30 years of experience in nonprofit management and systems development, Ann has a proven track record of raising and strategically directing significant public and private funding to enhance early childhood care and education. Most recently, she led the Guilford County Partnership for Children, part of North Carolina’s nationally recognized Smart Start network. In this role, Ann led efforts to stabilize the childcare workforce by reinstating WAGE$ in Guilford County, a critical salary supplement program. She also facilitated agreements to braid funds between multiple organizations to address credentialing challenges resulting from new state mandates. Previously, as the founding director of Smart Beginnings (now the Center for Early Success) in Southside Virginia, Ann secured the largest private investment in school readiness in Virginia at that time. Under her leadership, local performance on the state's pre-literacy assessment improved by 50% over a three-year period and remained stable over the next seven years. As a program officer for the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation, she built the initial operating infrastructure for Smart Beginnings coalitions across 22 cities and counties. Ann has also held leadership positions with Nash-Rocky Mount Schools and Easter Seals South Carolina. Since 2017, she has taught nonprofit financial leadership and social enterprise at Duke University. Ann has chaired the Danville Public Schools Foundation Board, served as a delegate to Virginia’s Early Childhood Advisory Council, and facilitated the Federal Reserve of Virginia’s Regional School Readiness Roundtable. She was also selected as a representative for the Frontiers of Innovation Learning Community at Harvard University's Center on the Developing Child. Ann holds a bachelor's degree in international studies from the University of South Carolina.

Dan Wuori

He/Him

Dr. Dan Wuori is Founder and President of Early Childhood Policy Solutions LLC (a public policy consultancy focused on early education and development) and Strategic Advisor on Early Childhood at The Saul Zaentz Charitable Foundation. Known across the globe for his daily child development lessons on social media, Dr. Wuori’s work has been profiled by the New York Times, which called his posts “a font of delight and edification…His feed is educational, but also, simply put — “awwwww.” His new book, The Daycare Myth: What We Get Wrong About Early Care and Education (and What We Should Do About It) was released by Teachers College Press at Columbia University on September 27, 2024. Now in its third printing, the book topped Amazon’s education, education reform, and developmental psychology charts upon its announcement on the basis of pre-orders alone. Dr. Wuori joined The Hunt Institute as its founding Director of Early Learning in January of 2019, and served as Senior Director from February 2021 to November 2023, establishing himself as one of the nation’s most trusted, bipartisan policy advisors in the field. A former kindergarten teacher and school district administrator, Dan served as Deputy Director of South Carolina First Steps to School Readiness – the state’s comprehensive, public-private early learning initiative – from 2005-2018. In this role he worked alongside elected leaders to develop significant, bipartisan support for early childhood education and oversaw system innovations including the delivery of public prekindergarten in private, community- and faith-based preschools, improvements to the state’s IDEA Part C early intervention system, the creation of statewide program accountability standards, and the expansion of evidence-based home visiting programs.

20 Jan 2026 13:00 – 14:00

Online

Free

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Reimagining early years support: lessons from First Five South Carolina

About Nesta

Reimagining early years support: lessons from First Five South Carolina