This project was an important stepping stone for our fairer start mission to inform work aimed at supporting and scaling evidence-based parenting interventions, to contribute to our aim of closing the income-related outcome gap in children’s development at age five.

By understanding what drives or impedes the successful scale up of parenting interventions in the UK, we can do more effective research into scaling up effective parenting interventions. This will help us to avoid repeating mistakes of the past, and understand what actions we (and others seeking to scale parenting interventions) need to take in order to successfully scale existing or new interventions.

Our fairer start mission’s goal is to narrow the outcome gap between children growing up in disadvantage and the national average. We have a strong focus on supporting parents/carers of children aged under five. Children’s early years are a crucial period of development that lay the foundation for their later cognitive, social, emotional and health outcomes. Interventions that support families during the early years have the potential to make a significant positive difference to children’s lives and their long-term educational, employment and health outcomes.

This project enabled Nesta to learn from successfully scaled parenting interventions, and to inform the development of our own strategy for scaling parenting interventions, as well as informing the work of others working in this field.

Nesta worked with BIT to review existing research literature on the topic of scaling parenting interventions and interview key stakeholders such as individuals and teams who have developed, implemented and scaled parenting interventions, and experts involved in relevant research and policy areas. We did this by searching articles in databases using keywords to identify interventions that have been scaled.

The research included a range of parenting interventions, such as home visiting, group-based and digital interventions. We were particularly interested in parenting interventions that target disadvantaged parents and interventions that support children’s early development, between pregnancy and age five.

Acknowledgements

Additional project work by Andras Beszterczey, Cameron Knott, Rachel Lim and Anna Bird, all from BIT.