During the partnership, we designed and tested solutions with communities. Projects ranged from in-depth engagement with disadvantaged families to co-design new ways to support parent-child interactions, to developing an early-years data tool to optimise targeting of support.

York is a city with great strengths to support early childhood development, but a number of challenges too. It is a city of wide contrasts - there are stark inequalities between advantaged and disadvantaged families. In York’s most affluent ward, only 7% of children live in poverty - but in the least advantaged wards, over 20% children are living in poverty.

This discrepancy translates into a wide gap in outcomes for disadvantaged children on a range of education and health measures. The gap in York is wider than the national average and has proved persistently difficult to close.

Through this partnership, we wanted to explore how we can improve outcomes for York’s most disadvantaged children, and ensure every child has the best possible start in life so they can thrive and reach their potential. What do families in York want and need, and how can support be offered in the most engaging way possible? How can the early years sector and other relevant agencies work together in a more joined up way to support families across the whole system? How can we embed and scale promising existing initiatives in a sustainable way?

Our work explored these and other questions, and shared learning across the other partner areas in the fairer start local programme. Our approach combined the deep expertise and existing relationships of City of York Council and York’s diverse early years sector with Nesta’s own expertise in data science, experimental evaluation and design. We were pleased to be able to work closely together for such a sustained period of time, giving us opportunities to test out how different methods can be applied to tackle challenging problems, and to really understand the context, systems and people in York that we were working with and for.