Nesta recently published our report Parenting support at scale: market analysis, which has identified 135 different parenting programmes for families with children younger than five years old. This report found that while there is a large number of parenting programmes available on the market, they vary a lot in the outcomes they are seeking to achieve, how widely they are implemented and their evidence of impact on child development.

We also identified that there are some barriers to flows of information in the market of parenting support, which make it difficult for local authority commissioners to identify which parenting programmes may be most impactful for their local families.

Since Nesta’s report was published, the Department for Education has published its Best Start in Life strategy, which sets out an ambition to provide best start family hubs in every local authority in England. In this strategy, the government has committed to “fund more evidence-based parenting and home learning offers to achieve the 75% good level of development milestone, and bridge the critical gap before children enter school. We will set clearer rules to ensure that funding is used on high-quality parenting programmes.”

To support policymakers and local authority commissioners with this ambition, Nesta carried out a rapid programme of research and development to make it easier for decision-makers to: 

• navigate the evidence base about programmes that support parenting and the HLE 
• identify the most impactful programmes that meet their requirements.

We conducted three strands of research, which informed the development of a tool to help local authority early-years service commissioners choose context-specific parenting and HLE programmes that are most suitable for the parents they work with.

The research strands included:

1. Identifying impactful parenting and HLE programmes: In addition to extracting information from the Foundations Guidebook, we also carried out a call for evidence to identify parenting and HLE programmes that have had robust impact evaluations (eg, randomised controlled trials) completed. We then carried out a rapid critical appraisal of the evaluation studies using the methodology developed by Foundations (see their technical guide). We made a list of parenting and HLE programmes that have robust evidence of causal impact on child development for children aged three and four years old.
2. Interviews with local authority early-years commissioners: We carried out interviews with local authority commissioners of early-years parenting and HLE programmes. The purpose of these interviews was to understand their priorities when deciding which programmes to fund for their local families. This information helped us to understand how to make a decision-making tool most useful to local authority commissioners.
3. Quantitative survey with parents: We designed and delivered an experimental survey with parents, which is designed to offer them a series of options for parenting and HLE programmes they could access, and get feedback on their relative preferences for these programmes. Through this survey, we hoped to learn about which programme features may be most important to parents when deciding whether or not to take up an offer of support. The types of features we learned about include, for example, the focus of the programme, whether it is offered individually or in a group format, and whether it is offered in person or online.

We also developed a decision-making tool, currently called the Parenting Support Commissioning Assistant for Local Areas (PASCAL). The PASCAL tool is informed by findings from the research about evidence-based programmes and local authority commissioners’ and parent preferences, and builds on our previous work to model the impact of various parenting programmes on the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile. The aim of the tool is to make it easier for commissioners to select parenting and HLE programmes that are suited to their local circumstances, while also considering the potential of the programme to make a positive impact on child development, and the likely size of impact.

The visualisation below summarises the three strands of planned research, which informed our development of the PASCAL decision-making tool.

We completed the three strands of research by mid-September and created a first version of the PASCAL tool in mid-November.