In this project, we’re working with local authorities to better understand the approaches that work best when it comes to supporting different families in different contexts. We also want to identify promising activities for future development to support positive outcomes for children.

The project has been inspired by the work of Dobbie and Fryer in schools in the USA. Researchers analysed large datasets about children’s attainment alongside detailed information about the practices that schools and teachers employed, from behavioural policies to teacher feedback. This analysis has made a significant contribution to understanding some of the elements of professional practice that make a difference to children’s educational outcomes.

In our project, we’re using a wide range of publicly available datasets to group local authorities (LAs) in England into clusters. The datasets reflect factors which can affect school readiness and early years outcomes e.g. number of children in low income households, under 18s conception rate and domestic abuse rates. Rather than grouping LAs on a regional basis, the clusters group LAs into statistical neighbours i.e. LAs which share characteristics based on the data and statistics that we explored. We can use these clusters to look at the relative performance of children growing up facing economic disadvantage in different areas.

The next step is to launch a wide-ranging survey of local early years practices to generate a detailed dataset about LA activities relating to services such as health visiting, childcare, speech language and communication and parenting support. We’ll analyse this dataset alongside our clustering work to see if there are trends that can help us identify activities which may be having a particular impact on children’s outcomes.

It’s an ambitious project and we know adapting a methodology that was previously used in schools to local authorities is far from straightforward. The way early years services are delivered in England is varied and complex. LAs need to respond to very different local priorities, populations and pressures. In addition, disruption caused by the pandemic means that identifying standard practice over the last few years is not always simple.

To develop an effective survey, we needed to find a way to negotiate this complexity. Our process has been built around consultation and collaboration with stakeholders including LA delivery teams and service leads, experts in key service areas, policy leads and specialist researchers.

We knew we needed to strike a balance between generating a wide-ranging dataset and ensuring that the time needed to take part in the research was manageable. We worked with three guiding questions:

● What factors that affect children’s outcomes at five are most likely to be influenced by local services?

● Where might local variation help us learn something important about the kinds of activities that really make a difference to children and families, and to different children and families?

● In order to make the best use of research participants’ time, what information can be found elsewhere?

We started by sharing an early version of the survey with some of our Fairer Start Local partners. They gave an initial assessment of the proposed survey content, as well as honest and constructive feedback about the challenges of participating in the research.

Our next consultation round involved over 70 LA early years staff though a webinar hosted by the Local Government Association. We explored whether LAs agreed that the themes we had identified were appropriate. We discussed what LA staff thought was useful about the research for them and ideas for sharing and disseminating findings. Participants were interested in learning from similar LAs, how the research could support local decision making and using participation in the project to support joining working. LAs identified that a bespoke report about their own LAs would be useful and we’ve included that in our plans.

Following this, early years staff from five LAs gave detailed feedback on the survey. They probed whether our questions were clear and got to the heart of the issue, and gave advice about making participation in the research attractive and manageable for LAs. They advised us to focus more on perinatal mental health provision, integrated services and special educational needs and disability (SEND) services.

We also shared the drafts with academics and experts in the field, including the Early Intervention Foundation (EIF), specialists in aspects of health visiting, parent-infant mental health and parenting interventions and teams in government working on developments including family hubs. This helped us to identify additional links with key policy developments, to sharpen the focus of certain sections to reflect activities with an existing evidence base and to identify where we might be duplicating existing information.

Our initial project goal was to generate a dataset that captures clear and specific information about services and practices. However, the consultation phase also highlighted the need to include qualitative responses. In particular, we want to make sure we take this opportunity to learn about participants’ perspectives on the changing needs of children and families, the activities and approaches they think are particularly impactful in their area and any local challenges.

In July, we appointed the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) to conduct the fieldwork for the pilot phase. The pilot phase will take place in autumn 2023 and we’re aiming to work with 30 local authorities. It will include a survey and an interview: the survey will focus on collecting data about specific practices and the interview will provide the opportunity for more reflective responses from LA teams.

We’re taking a staged approach to the pilot. We’ll invite LAs to take part in the project in batches, so that we can use their responses and feedback to help us refine and edit the questions that we ask during the pilot phase itself. We hope that this will mean we can ask fewer and more focused questions at each stage and make the best use of the time LAs invest in the project.

If the pilot phase shows promising results, Nesta will have the option of scaling the research to all local authorities in England in 2023. Whether or not the project rolls out, we’re committed to sharing insights from the pilot about early years practice. We also hope that there will be much to learn about the project methodology that will support and inspire others.