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.

Yet not every child gets what they need to develop 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 is focused on addressing this disadvantage.

We work on this issue from multiple angles – collaborating with local authorities to boost the services they provide and developing and adapting programmes to support parents. But 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 school attainment.

We are therefore exploring ways of alleviating the financial pressure faced by families experiencing poverty when their children are in their earliest years. By reducing the financial pressures parents face, we believe we may be able to reduce parental stress and improve material resources for parenting – helping enable a more optimal home learning environment for children during critical years of their development.

What are we doing?

Our aim is to look at different models of income support – on their own and in relation to other early years supports and interventions – to test their impact on reducing inequalities in children’s outcomes and develop policy options that respond to this evidence.

Our work will involve engaging parents and families, gleaning new insights from existing trials and administrative data and making observational studies (for example, exploiting natural experiments around new policy roll-outs). Through these projects, we seek to better understand the impact of financial support on child development, parental stress and the home learning environment and to assess the cost-effectiveness of different early years and income support interventions. We may also pursue randomised controlled trials to evaluate interventions, such as cash transfers or income maximisation, that support disadvantaged families’ financial circumstances during the critical years of their babies’ development.

Why are we doing this?

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 whether investment in the early years should be directed towards more generous benefits or more or better services remains an important, unanswered challenge for policy makers.

As part of answering this question, we want to better understand the causal effect of increasing household income for families with a low-income on child development outcomes. As a society, we can then support the greatest number of families with the most cost-effective support, so all children can reach their full potential.