All babies and children need stable, caring relationships and stimulating experiences to thrive. The environment and experiences of early childhood shape our brains and bodies, creating the building blocks of our physical, emotional and cognitive skills. However, not every child gets what they need for their development during the early years. Children growing up in poverty are less likely to live a long, fulfilling and happy life than their peers.
Our fairer start mission focuses on addressing this disadvantage from multiple angles - collaborating with local authorities to boost the services they provide and developing and adapting programmes to support parents. Alongside these interventions, we cannot ignore the reality that growing up in poverty is harmful for child development - nor evidence that material increases in family income improve children’s early attainment at school.
We believe that with the right support, every child can have what they need to thrive.
It is clear that poverty can affect the development of babies and young children, putting them at greater risk of falling behind for years to come. Yet the question of how investment in the early years should integrate and balance generous benefits or more or better services remains an important, unanswered challenge for policymakers.
Our work in this area aims to test new ways of alleviating the financial pressures that families on low incomes face during the critical early years of a child’s development. We believe that by tackling poverty alongside other early years support, we can reduce parental stress, improve material resources, and help create a home learning environment where every child can thrive.
Our current work is centred on understanding the impact of support during pregnancy and the very first months of a child's life. Our primary focus is the Family Hubs Pregnancy Grant, a major project through which we are generating new evidence on cash transfers for expectant parents. This project allows us to learn how direct financial support, when ‘stacked’ alongside practical support offered in family hubs, can generate benefits that are greater than the sum of their parts.
As we deliver this work, we are also shaping our future strategy. We are keen to explore further opportunities to build the evidence base and test new solutions. While not active projects, some of the key questions we are interested in include:
- How can financial support best be integrated into family hubs and the wider early years support system, to enable the ‘stacking’ of interventions?
- What innovations could help to ensure parents are maximising their income by claiming all the means-tested benefits they are eligible for?
- Are there opportunities to automate or streamline the process for applying for benefits to reduce administrative burdens on families and services?
- How can we generate more robust, causal evidence on the long-term impact of different models of financial support on children's development and life outcomes?
- What new approaches could promote financial inclusion for families with young children, helping them to save, manage debt and access affordable credit?
We believe collaboration is essential to answering these questions. If you are a researcher, policymaker, practitioner or innovator with a shared interest in finding and testing innovative ways to give all children a fairer start, please get in touch with us at [email protected].
This project is testing an innovative model of support for expectant parents on low incomes in the London Borough of Camden. The trial provides an unconditional cash grant of £500 during pregnancy. A key feature is that the payment is automated, removing the need for families to apply and reducing administrative burdens.
The grant is delivered through Camden’s family hubs and is ‘stacked’ with proactive support from a family navigator, who helps connect families with wider services, such as benefits advice and antenatal classes. Through our mixed-methods evaluation, using both qualitative and quantitative data, we are testing whether the grant not only helps to alleviate financial pressures but also acts as a bridge to encourage parents to engage with the broader support available through their local family hub in pregnancy and infancy.
This mixed-methods project, conducted in collaboration with the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), seeks to understand the impact of the two-child limit policy on early learning outcomes in England. The qualitative component, led by Nesta, involved interviewing 35 parents affected by the policy about their children's early-learning opportunities. The quantitative component, led by the IFS, used the ECHILD database to compare the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile outcomes of children affected by the policy with those who are not.
www.nesta.org.uk/project/exploring-the-impact-of-family-income-on-child-development/
